INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM TO BE INVESTIGATED

(Some unnamed fast food chain!) is offering a free hockey card with every order of fries (alone, or as part of a combo).

When you purchase fries, you will receive a card for a player on the Toronto Maple Leafs. Of course, you will want to “Collect the whole set!” as the unnamed fast food chain's commercials encourage you to do. We will investigate, with the use of a mathematical model, how many purchases it would take to “Collect the whole set!”

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I absolutely love this investigation/project. I think I love it most because there is obviously no one correct answer to the question, "How many purchases are required to collect the whole set." I think it's very healthy for kids (this was a Gr. 9 project, but can be done as early as Grade 7 or as late as Grade 12 with no problems) to analyze the world in a "probabilistic" sense and not a correct/incorrect sense. It encourages students to make *reasonable* conclusions, not simply find a correct answer.

This project is step-by-step, and likely needs very little intervention on the part of the teacher/homeschooling parent, but it's so fun you'll probably want to do it too! (Well, if you're like me and you love running simulations a bunch of times.)

After completing this investigation, students should really understand the concept of a simulation, and that each time you run a simulation, you get a different result. So much of our modern information is based on such simulations (from weather/climate forcasting to military strategy to figuring out how parents will react when you ask for a new MP3 player!) that I think it's a very worthwhile activity for students, at any age.