Healthy Snack Shop
Problem
What information do you need to know to make the healthy snack shop work well?
Talk to someone else about your ideas and make a list of questions.
Choose one of the questions to focus on. How will you find out the answer?
How will you collect data to help answer your question?
How will you present the data?
How will you use the data to answer your question?
Now carry out your plan!
We would love to hear about your ideas, the question you asked, and how you answered it. Please do send us pictures to show how you presented your data too.
Getting Started
Think carefully about how you can answer your question - perhaps your question actually needs to be phrased differently so you can answer it, or perhaps it is really more than one question!
How will you make the data you collect very clear for others to see and understand?
How will you know what the data is telling you?
Student Solutions
We had a few different ideas sent in for this activity. Calum said:
You would first need to find out how many people are in the class so that you can buy enough inventory for them. This could be done either in a simple head count or through contacting the school to find this out. After that, you would need to find out what healthy snacks people would like to eat and then find the most common ones to save money. Next you would need to seek permission to set up shop. Finally, you would buy your inventory.
Thank you for sending us your ideas, Calum. How would you find out which healthy snacks people like to eat?
Lila from Westridge in the USA said:
How will you collect data to help answer your question? I can make a bar graph to see what healthy foods my class likes the most. Then the top foods will be the ones in my snack shop.
Well done, Lila - a bar graph will make it easy to see which snacks are the most popular.
Giselle, Lyra and Taylor, also from Westridge, said:
I chose the question, how much does each healthy snack cost? To collect the data, you first need to figure out the price of all the snacks you are selling, and then figure out if you would make the price less if the person buys more than one.
This is a good idea - you might want to lower the price if a customer buys more than one snack. How would you decide what price to sell the snacks for?
Milly said:
I would first see what healthy snacks are most liked. I would then look at the price for each healthy snack. After that, I would ask myself:
How many people asked for this, and is it worth getting?
What is my budget a week, day, month and year?
Which of these snacks are the most healthy ones?
How much space do I have?
I would then start working out the easiest one: How much space do I have? Then, I would see what the size of my stall is, how much room there is for snacks and if you can see all of the compartments. Then I would see the snacks on my data board of what snacks are most liked. I would choose the most healthy snacks and mark them. Now, I would look at how many people asked for what, how much this cost, and if it's worth getting. I would go to the shops and look at how much each item cost. If it was cheap for a lot or a few, I would get them. If it was expensive for a few or a lot, then it depended on what my budget was and how many people asked for it. The data that I had recorded earlier would be a hand-drawn bar graph with up to 30 items that people liked.
These are some good ideas, Milly. I wonder how you would decide if a snack was cheap or expensive?
Zhelong from The British School in The Netherlands said:
Question: How to list the opinions and represent them, how many healthy snacks should the shop get for each snack
Solution: I would do an online survey to 1000 people-500 people and let them vote 3-5 votes for different snacks, then let the computer turn that survey into a pie chart/graph, the result you should let it turn to percentages. Use that number then order the total snack and fruit in different fruit and snack columns, with that, you should hopefully (probably) get your shop nicely opened.
Thank you, Zhelong! I think Zhelong is saying that if 40% of people voted for something as their favourite snack, then 40% of your snacks should be that type of snack. Why might this be a good idea?
Nishad from the International School of Brussels in Belgium sent in their solution for how to decide what price to charge for bananas. They have assumed that as the price goes up, fewer people will buy the bananas. Why might this be true?
Have a look at Nishad's table. Can you have a think about why the most profit can be made if you choose a price somewhere in the middle, rather than setting a really cheap or really expensive price for the bananas?
Thank you to everybody who sent in their solutions for this activity!
Teachers' Resources
Healthy Snack Shop
What information do you need to know to make the healthy snack shop work well?
Talk to someone else about your ideas and make a list of questions.
Choose one of the questions to focus on. How will you find out the answer?
How will you collect data to help answer your question?
How will you present the data?
How will you use the data to answer your question?
Now carry out your plan!
We would love to hear about your ideas, the question you asked, and how you answered it. Please do send us pictures to show how you presented your data too.
Why do this problem?
This task offers children a context in which they can pose their own question, collect and present the data needed to answer it, and then interpret the data to find out the answer. You may find it useful to set aside more than one lesson for this activity.
Possible approach
Offering a motivating context as the basis for data handling is an approach advocated by Alan Graham, and you can read more about his four step model (which we suggest below) in our article P is for Posing.
Although this task has been framed in terms of a healthy snack shop, the key point is offering a context that will appeal to your learners. Ideally, it will be real so that the whole process has a meaningful purpose and outcome.
Begin by introducing the context, and allow time for learners to talk in pairs about the kind of information they need to know. As a whole group, gather everyone's questions on the board. Try to value all contributions equally at this stage. You may find your pupils suggest questions such as:
- What healthy snacks should we sell?
- How much should we charge?
- Where shall we have our healthy snack shop?
- What shall we do with any money we make?
But they will have lots of ideas which we simply cannot predict!
Once you have a list of questions, facilitate a discussion about how you might answer each one. At this point, it will become apparent that some questions will be much harder to answer than others for all sorts of reasons, and you might also find that a question actually becomes a different question, or more than one question. For example, 'what healthy snacks should we sell? might become 'which kind of fruit is most popular in our class?'. Try to keep track of this on the board for all to see.
After some time, you will have a list of questions on the board which could be investigated by the class. You could invite pairs of pupils to choose one of the questions and allow some time for them to discuss how they are going to collect the data needed to answer that question. Suggest that each pair makes a plan (this doesn't necessarily need to be recorded, but if the period of data collection is not following on immediately from the planning time, it might help to jot points down to serve as a reminder).
It is up to you how you facilitate the data collection. Assuming that data will be collected from members of the class orally, you could split the class into two groups so that each pair is also split up. Allow time for one group to ask questions of the other group, then swap over.
Having collected their data, pairs can now decide on how to represent it. It may be appropriate to have a mini plenary to talk about ways they know and how they might decide which is 'best' for their particular data set.
Each pair can then use their presented data to answer the question they chose. You could invite each pair to share their interpretations of the data with the whole class, so that the whole class is aware of everyone's findings. You may find that more questions are raised and so the whole process begins all over again!
Key questions
How will you find out the answer to your question?
How will you collect the data you need?
How will you present the data?
How will you use the data to answer your question?
Possible support
All learners might benefit from using appropriate IT, depending on their experience.
Possible extension
You can encourage learners to investigate another question, whether it is one that was posed initially or one that has arisen from their own data collection and interpretation.