Dating Game: An Introduction to Scatterplots

A good friend of mine, Erica Chauvet (here is a great article about her), shared with me this activity. As with most of my AP Statistics friends, I met Erica at the AP Reading many years ago. Have I told you recently how much professional development comes out of the Readings? If you have not yet done so, apply with College Board to be a Reader!

Okay, off of my soapbox...

This activity can actually be used at any level of learning scatterplots. If you teach beginning linear regression, this would be great as a closer. Of course, I teach AP Stat so I use it as an opener. As a matter of fact, I give zero instruction on bivariate data before giving this out and the kiddos jump right in and start plotting and such.

For the random pairing component, as always, I demonstrate proper techniques to my class. Sometimes, I put the student names in a "hat" and draw out two at a time - those will make a pair - and I continue until the "hat" is empty and everyone has a partner. On this particular day, I used the random number generator on my Google Sheets (it's an add-on). I pulled up my spreadsheet of student names on the projector, randomly assigned each student a number 1-30 (you know, because I have 30 students in this class), and sorted the numbers. The partnerships were students 1 & 2, 3 & 4, ... , 29 & 30. I like to randomly pair so that students get out of their comfort zone and build relationships with new people. Come to think of it though, I'm pretty sure none of my students have actually gone on a date after this activity. Perhaps you'll have better luck!

Feel free to make a copy of this activity for yourself, just click here!

~SSB

Comments

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