Sports Center Seat Counts!

Students will discover that when counting large collections of objects, errors and uncertainties are inevitable.

You will be asked to form groups of three to four. Absentees may reduce the number of students in your group. Your task as a group is to accurately count the number of seats in the main gym.

1. We will go together to the FSM China Friendship Sports Center
2. There your group will decide how to count the seats in the main gym
3. We will return as a group and put on the white board the following information:
   1. The names of the members of your group
   2. Your group's total number of seats
   3. Details on how you arrived at your total number of seats: what methods you used to count the seats

Measures of center and spread

Students will be able to....

• Determine the mode for a set of values
• Determine the median for a set of values
• Determine the mean μ for a set of values
• Determine the minimum for a set of values
• Determine the maximum for a set of values
• Determine the range for a set of values

After returning to the classroom and continuing on the second day of this activity the students will learn to calculate the mode, median, mean, minimum, maximum, and range for the seat data.

Mode: The mode is the value that occurs most frequently in the data.

Median: The median is the central (or middle) value in a data set. If a number sits at the middle, then it is the median. If the middle is between two numbers, then the median is half way between the two middle numbers. Note the data must be in order (sorted) before you can find the median.

Mean (average): The mean, also called the average, is calculated mathematically by adding the values and then dividing by the number of values. The number of values is also called the sample size n. The symbol μ is sometimes used for the mean.
mean = sum of data/sample size or count of the data = Σx/n

Minimum: The smallest value.

Maximum: The largest value.

Range: The maximum − the minimum.

UB results summer 2007

Upward bound students in action, engaged in doing mathematics.

Data from earlier classes:

2007 College of Micronesia-FSM. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.