Great Conversation Heart Caper (Day 1)

Like I said yesterday, I LOVE when math is so interesting to my kid they forget they are working!  Of course, when you hand them candy they will do anything for you!

We began our class by tracing around our hands.  I then gave each student a box of candy hearts and asked them to discover how many hearts it took to cover their entire palm.  We collected the data onto a table and next week we will use the data for our weekly range, mean, median, and mode review.

Next, I gave them a packet that we will be working through today and Monday.  I explained that we will be investigating a few questions:

1. Does the company that makes the conversation hearts put the same number of candies in each box?
2. Does the company put a certain number of each color of heart in each box?
3. Can we predict the number of candies, and the number of each color of candy in an unopened box?

We began our investigation by collecting our individual data.  We organized and displayed the information about the color and number of our candies in a table.  We began to interpret the individual data by creating fractions, decimals (using calculators), and percents to describe our data. 

 I then placed all of the individual data on a spreadsheet.  This allowed us to find totals of not only the number of candies in the room, but the total number of each color of candy in the room.

Using this spreadsheet, we collected and organized our class data onto a table in our packet.  We now began to interpret our class data using fractions, decimals, and percents.  Once we had the new percentages, we compared our individual data to the class data to see if we had any commonalities.  I explained that since our individual data is such a small sample, it is not likely that we would have many common percentages.

To get a more precise picture of the data we had gathered.  We revisited the spreadsheet.  We found the range (difference) in the number of candies in the boxes of candies in the class.  Then we found the mean (average) number of candies that were in each box in the class.  We found the mode (most often repeated) number of candies in the boxes.  We also found the median (middle) number of candies in the boxes.  This helped us answer the first question:

Does the company that makes the conversation hearts put the same number of candies in each box?

Based upon our data.... they do (about 29 pieces per box).  I explained that the reason the boxes do not always have an equal number of candies is that the candies are filled by machine.  The machines are programmed to put in an amount equal to a WEIGHT (1 oz).  There may be a discrepancy in the weight of each candy, which would mean more or less candies packaged to meet the weight total.

Here is the spreadsheet with the data collected for each class:

Johnson

Dittrich

Whitehead

Monday we will spend time comparing these spreadsheets, their data, and their pie graphs.  We will continue working with the data collected by the entire 5th grade.

AND