Activity Overview
The students will be working primarily with the concept of % of a number. They will calculate the number of people expected to vote when given the population and % of registered voters along with historical data on percentage of voter turnout. They will then use polls to graph predictions.
Before the Activity
Before the activity, look up the voting population, find the percentage of registered voters (usually can be found at your country's census website), as well as the voter turnout the previous election. Also find out what the current polls, in percent are indicating.
During the Activity
Review how to find percent of a number. Give the students the data that you looked up earlier (if you have access to a lab, you can have students find it themselves). Challenge them to figure out how many people will vote for each candidate or party (as the case may be).
They will then have to calculate the number of people who are registered and then find out of those how many will likely vote (based on previous election - you can discuss this further as to why/why not this is accurate). Using the polls, they then predict how many will vote for each candidate/party.
After the Activity
After they do this, they can then, as an extension, graph in cellsheet as a pie graph and bar graph using both percent and then the actual numbers of people. You can then do a quickpoll on the navigator to find out who they would vote for (keep it anonymous), send out the results to their calculators and then discuss.