SamizdatMath

This is a set of activities which develops the idea of odds and how they can be applied to understanding why the lottery is, at best, a sucker's bet. It takes a list of ten different things that can happen, from rolling a set of snake eyes using two dice (1/36) to being born with an extra finger or toe (1/500) to winning an Oscar (1/11,500) to drowning in a bathtub (1/850,000) to becoming president of the US (1/10,000,000) to winning the Mega-Millions or Powerball lotteries (which have slightly

Here is an interesting fact: did you know that most castles built during the middle ages were made from wood? It's a true fact! But you're probably thinking: wait, if most castles were made of wood, how come when you google the word "castle," all you see are stone edifices? The answer is: survivor bias! Think about it: you build a wood castle, and over the years, what's the thing that threatens it most? FIRE! So all those wood castles burnt to the ground over the last thousand years, while the

This is an incredible, absolutely wonderful investigation that will get your students working with ratios to pursue a worthy goal: to make the best bubble juice that makes the longest lasting bubbles! All you need to do are three ingredients: dishwashing liquid, glycerin (available at pharmacies or online) and di-hydrogen oxide, better known as "water." Your students mix different amounts of the the three ingredients together and test to see how long the bubbles last. But the activity doesn't e

This is an activity that uses data collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center tracking the use of Confederate symbols in the form of monuments, courthouses, schools, and other public amenities, including parks, highways and holidays. The activity takes place in 3 parts: The first part is that students assemble and label a timeline that tracks the rise of Confederate symbols from 1860 to the present day (2016.) In the second part, students match dates to 10 different events in Civil Rights h

This is one in a continuing series of activities that takes mathematics and applies it to social issue, including Food Waste and Mathematics: From Farm to Table to Dump, Mathematics, Demographics & Slavery: The 1790 Census in Ratio, Percents & Graphs, MathBusters: Percentage Practice to Analyze 2016 Election Results, and Statistics, Histograms and Lies Presidential Candidates Tell. In this case, we are looking at how far food must travel in order to make it from where it is produced to the place

Here's a very uncomfortable fact: it takes 4 pounds of potatoes to make 1 pound of potato chips. That means that for every 1 pound bag of potato chips you eat, 3 pounds of potatoes have to be thrown away. What a waste of food! This is a series of activities that looks at the hidden world of food waste. It includes a look at how much food is wasted as it is "processed" into finished products like french fries and potato chips. It also includes mathematical activities where students calculate how

This is a comprehensive investigation of basic measures of central tendency (mean, median and mode) using a hands-on approach. This investigation occurs as a set of hands-on experiments that groups of students conduct using a set of 7 cups, Students start by filling the cups with water (or sand, or beans, or whatever you like) to various levels, and then re-arranging the position and levels of the cup in order to find the mean, median and mode. By focusing the students' attention on the concept

This is one of an occasional series of mondo-tough problems that use small numbers (or no numbers at all!) Here’s how it works: we all teach our students how to take a group of numbers and calculate the range, mean, median and mode. Seems pretty simple, and our students tired of it damned quickly. Can you blame them? It’s just “do what the teacher told me to do, and then write the answer here...” kind of busywork. But what if we were to switch the tables on our students: let’s give them t