Water Balloon Catcher Lesson Plan

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Abstract

This lesson is designed to have students combine budgeting skills, construction skills, and imagination to create the most marketable balloon catcher possible.

Standards (NCTM)

Data Analysis

Formulate questions that can be addressed with data and collect, organize, and display relevant data to answer them

• select, create, and use appropriate graphical representations of data, including histograms, box plots, and scatter plots.

Develop and evaluate inferences and predictions that are based on data

• use observations about differences between two or more samples to make conjectures about the populations from which the samples were taken;
• use conjectures to formulate new questions and plan new studies to answer them.

Student Prerequisites

• Technological:
  Students must be able to:
  
  
  • perform basic mouse manipulations such as point, click and drag.
  • use a browser such as Netscape for experimenting with the activities.

Teacher Preparation

Teacher will need a selection of pre-priced materials that the students can construct their water balloon catchers from. (This can consist of any sort of scraps your students bring in.)

Students will need:

• Access to a browser
• Water balloons and other water balloon catcher building materials supplied by the teacher.

Lesson Outline

1. Focus and Review
• Review misleading graphs
2. Objectives
• Students will create a water balloon catcher.
• The class will test all the water balloon catchers and record the test results.
• The students will use the data gathered during testing to create commercials with at least two graphs, which try to convince consumers to purchase their groups's water balloon catcher.
3. Teacher Input
• Explain the procedure for constructing and testing the water balloon catchers.
• Discuss the criteria by which the water balloon catchers will be evaluated by explaining the data collection sheet.

4. Guided Practice
• Have the students use their allotted amount of class credit to purchase materials for building their water balloon catchers.

5. Independent Practice
• Have students create their water balloon catchers
• Have the students test each group's water balloon catcher and record how each catcher performs.
• Have the students use the data gathered during catcher testing to create commercials containing at least two graphs to convince the consumer to buy their group's catcher.

6. Closure
• Have the students present their commercials and graphs to the class.
• Choose several of the students' commercials and graphs to discuss as a class.
• Have the class decide if the graphs used in the commercials were misleading or not and why.

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