There is nothing like a jar full of rainbow candy to get students' attention. Over a period of three days I had students guess how many Skittles were housed in the jar. I allowed them to pick up the jar, shake the jar, and measure the jar. The only thing they couldn't do was dump the candy out and count it. Wow!
Once I had enough data I sat down with my class and asked what they wanted to know about the Skittles activity. I thought the first thing they would ask was "Who was the closest?" I was so wrong. They wanted to know the volume of the jar and the volume of an individual candy. The students wanted to actually calculate the answer! I allowed them to try and they realized they didn't take into account the volume of the empty space between the candies.
Now it was time to lead them where I wanted them. How many candies were there? 1471! How do we determine who was the closest? Should it matter if they guessed above the actual number? Absolutely not! We started calculating by rote how close each individual student was. Well, that's obnoxious so I opened a spreadsheet. I couldn't believe how patient the students were while I populated it in front of them. They loved seeing how much every one guessed.
After creating the spreadsheet I asked the class what they thought a graph of the data would like. EVERY SINGLE STUDENT said it would be a random scatterplot with no pattern. Now to select the data and hit graph. Voila!
Look at that beautiful absolute value function!!!!! The students were shocked! Now for the discussion of why. This will lead into graphing absolute functions tomorrow.
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