Can your school use $5000? What school doesn't?! Well, the money is available, but the student body must decide how the money will be spent!

5K and No More - Producing Data will enable students to fantasize about what they would do to improve their school if allowed to answer the question, "How would $5000 best be spent at your school?" The activity begins with students distinguishing the differences between a sample survey, an experiment, and an observational study through a pre-activity. After this, the students are given five (5) scenarios in which they must discuss the pros and cons of each. In life we want things to be fair, so students must constantly think about bias. The company in this MEA desires the most efficient and effective way to collect information from the students without having to talk to everyone ... who has that kind of time!

Now, just when the students have found the most efficient and effective way to get students to share their thoughts on where the money should go, more information is revealed about the High School. How do we account for the brains and the brawn, the perfect attendee and the most missed days, or for the goth or skater?

Your Savvy Statisticians in the making will figure it out and tell you ALL about it.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. MEAs resemble engineering problems and encourage students to create solutions in the form of mathematical and scientific models. Students work in teams to apply their knowledge of science and mathematics to solve an open-ended problem while considering constraints and tradeoffs. Students integrate their ELA skills into MEAs as they are asked to clearly document their thought processes. MEAs follow a problem-based, student-centered approach to learning, where students are encouraged to grapple with the problem while the teacher acts as a facilitator. To learn more about MEAs visit: https://www.cpalms.org/cpalms/mea.aspx