The car that passes
Here is the question we would like you to work on:
What can you say about the car that passes the school gates next Monday morning at the end of playtime?
What will you have to do in the time leading up to Monday to make a statement that is very likely to be true?
We would love to hear about what you did.
What statement/s did you make?
What information did you collect in order to make those statements?
How did you find out whether the statements were true?
How will you decide what statements to make about the car?
How will you test whether the statements were true or not?
A class from Culford School in Suffolk UK all sent in a paragraph or two explaining how they went about this activity. You can read everything they sent in this Word document or this pdf.
I was so impressed I contacted the teacher to congratulate the pupils and to find out about how the work started. This is what he wrote back;
I used the challenge with [my pupils], deliberately choosing an easier (2*) open-ended task to allow them to take it where they wished. This is something I do quite often with the puzzles on the website as it allows an accessible start to be taken as far as possible.
It was introduced in the classroom with the webpage up on the Interactive White Board so that they could keep referring back to the original challenge whilst discussing it in their groups and we could scribble on it and highlight keywords.
As you can see from their responses we covered all sorts of eventualities from what happens if a car doesn't come at the right time or if loads come on a car-transporter up to what if the world ends on Sunday and does that make our prediction invalid!
The pupils decided on their strategy, location and time of testing and the older ones devised the spreadsheets for the surveying that were then used by both classes, with varying degrees of success. They then collated the information into bar graphs and pie charts before making their prediction.
Why do this problem?
Possible approach
- Was the car as we expected?
- Can we explain why some of the statements turned out to be true and some false?
- What might have happened if we had collected data just for one day? Why?
- What might have happened if we'd collected data for longer? Why?
Key questions
Possible extension
Ideas for further investigation may well come from the pupils when the event is over and you've had a chance to discuss the appropriateness of the data collected.
Possible support
Some pupils may need support in gathering their information in a practical sense. This task is not intended to 'test' particular recording or presentation methods, rather it is intended to focus on the process of data collection and interpretation as a whole.
You can read about some of the issues which might arise when teaching probability in this article.