Here's my final "required" post for this course. It's another website with fabulous Excel activities:
http://www.teacherlink.org/content/math/activities/excel.html
I particularly like the one involving M&Ms:
http://www.teacherlink.org/content/math/activities/ex-mmnumerical/home.html
The M&M activity is one I've seen before, only without technology. Students get individual bags, count up the frequency of each color, and perform calculations. They discuss mean, median, and mode, along with other mathematical topics. In the lesson I have, students can also make bar graphs and pie charts, adding in discussions about types of graphs and percentages. It is normally a lesson done as an introduction to these ideas. I would use this Excel lesson after students have learned about such topics. Instead, it would be a way to help them become familiar with the computing capabilities of Excel. Perhaps the two could be combined to be a lesson that spans two or three days...first learning about measures of central tendency, then using the "shortcut" of Excel to find them.
The best part is, though: everyone gets to eat M&Ms when the activities are completed!!
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Excel is a great tool for kids to use. The potential is enormous for students too. Sometimes math concepts are just too foreign and require some sort of physical or visual aspect to clarify what's actually happening.
In PA, however, it's been decreed that schools not reward students with junk food...M&M's included. No more pizza party for whatever reason, no more candy as part of classes etc. In some ways it's a bit sad, but in other ways it makes sense.
Hi Karina...we do the same thing with M&Ms and other candy/foods. For benchmark numbers, I let my kids see two containers...one with say a benchmark of 10 Starbursts, and then a full container in which they use their benchmark to help them estimate how much are in there. I use Cheerios and gum drops for place value. They stick toothpicks in each drop (each representing ones, tens, hundreds, etc)...and then they tell you what number they have after they put the Cheerios in. Valentine's Day and Easter, they use the hearts (colored w/ messages) and jelly beans for graphing and probability activities. For geometry, they glue marshmallows and toothpicks on paper to form different lines, shapes, and angles. And yes, the best part for them is to eat some of their work afterwards hehe.
Mark, looks like we might have 'junk food' banned here, as well. I understand not selling it in the cafeteria and in vending machines, but we should be allowed to use it in class. First of all, students get so excited when they get to eat! My kids would rather work while eating pizza than have free time with no pizza. I think part of it is that they are growing and thus constantly hungry. The other part is, I know many of my students don't get the best food at home (if theyget adequate food at all!) Our school is 50, maybe 60% low SES, and school is the only place they get nice meals. Why not give them some pizza for motivation?! If we counter it with mandatory exercise/PE courses every semester like some schools do, it won't be much of a problem.
Victor, thanks for more ideas! I love it, and I'm sure the kids will too:)
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