Education Technology


Collecting Pens (Continued)

Activity Overview

In this activity, students learn how to instruct the calculator to collect and organize the results from several trials of a simulation designed to find out how many boxes of cereals a customer would have to buy to collect all six color pens. Students enter a prewritten program, analyze the results of the simulation from the summary statistics and statistical plots.

Before the Activity

  • Study the program code and its explanation
  • See the attached PDF file for detailed instructions for this activity
  • Print pages 77 - 86 from the attached PDF file for your class
  • During the Activity

    Distribute the pages to the class.

    Follow the Activity procedures:

  • Download the program into the calculator
  • Download a copy of the program into other calculators using the link cables
  • Run the program, and enter the number of trials [≤ 99]
  • Observe the random numbers generated by the program, and understand that the program stores the data as a list
  • Sort the data in ascending order, record the minimum and maximum values, and determine the range
  • Produce and examine a list of statistics summarizing the information
  • Set up a histogram
  • Graph a box-and-whisker plot
  • Analyze the distribution of the data
  • After the Activity

    Students complete the Questions sheet.

    Review student results:

  • As a class, discuss questions that appeared to be more challenging
  • Re-teach concepts as necessary