Normal Distribution HyperDoc

I have found numerous normal distribution activities involving people's heights. I decided to take everything that I have seen and create a HyperDoc. Before this activity, I had not discussed normal distribution. This was an opportunity for my students to investigate and discover on their own.

Before I shared the HyperDoc with the students, I presented the first slide:

I had the students measure heights (inches) of each group member. Using painter's tape, I created a huge number line where the students stood by their height - thus creating a human dot plot. It was a little tight - I should have spaced out my tick marks a little more. Oh well, there's always next year. :) I mainly did the human dot plot to cancel out any errors while measuring. Some of my students were a little off and this corrected the issue.

I had a blank dot plot on the board where students had to plot their height. I made them take a picture and place it on the HyperDoc once they grabbed a laptop. While the students were completing the tasks, I walked around allowing the students to explore and create their own frequency table and histogram using Google Sheets and the hyperlinked tutorials. This provided a little review from the previous unit and allowed students to get a sense of the data.

Students were able to explore normal distribution by watching an EdPuzzle video. Once finished, I had the students create a normal curve using the mean and standard deviation from our data in the dot plot.

My favorite part - students made predictions using the normal curve:

After predictions, the class found the range of heights that fell within 1,2, and 3 standard deviations of the mean. Using the dot plot, each group also had to calculate the percentage of heights that fell into 1, 2, and 3 standard deviations of the mean. They compared the results to their predictions.

The last slide contains a video describing normal distribution and the 68, 95, and 99.7 rule. Even though one class was close, we were able to discuss why our data wasn't exactly normal!

This is the first year that I have tried this activity, and I loved it. I prefaced the class by saying, I'm just here as a facilitator - I'm not teaching you how to do this. You must use your group members, the videos, and previous knowledge to complete the task. I did have to assist some groups more than others, but that was expected. However, I tried to answer questions with questions! :)

If you would like to try it or alter the activity to make it your own - here is my HyperDoc!

~RJ

Comments

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