The point of this lesson was for us to generate our own data and later create histograms, dot plots, and box plots using the data. Students played Mario Kart 8 and took the average number of points for each group of 4 players at the end of a race. They had to answer the following questions:
Considering variables are plentiful in Mario Kart 8, I thought that it'd be a good idea to mention how these things can cause us to make skewed conclusions considering so many factors could have affected the outcome (items and course obstacles are good example for Mario Kart). They struggled with conceptual questions that required them to compare the group average to each individual player's number of points.
The activity was fun, but I don't think the students got what I wanted them to get out of it. I really wanted them to understand that all of these different variables in the game can affect what place you come in, which in turn affects the number of points you will get. Given this, it's hard to make a conclusion like "Mr. E is a better player than Mr. Campbell" because so many variables could affect the outcome. Only tiny portion of them were able to grasp that.
I am happy that I gave something new/different a shot! At the very least the kids had fun!
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