Blog Post

Guessing Ages Activity

This semester I tried a Guessing Ages Activity as a first day activity in my statistics classes.  My version of the activity is adapted from page 11 of Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks.  I found this activity to be a good ice breaker for the first day of class.  The students really enjoyed working in small groups to guess the ages of people and it gave me a chance to briefly review how to find the mean with students, a concept that they should already know from Pre-Algebra class.  Of course, later on in the class we talk about properties of the mean above and beyond what is learned in a Pre-Algebra class.  But this was an excellent way to review how to compute the mean.  It was also a good way to have the students do some calculations on the first day to break up the long list of definitions that is covered in Chapter 1 in the textbook.  Overall, I found this to be a successful activity.  And of course, the results from this activity can be used for further analysis later in the semester, but I have other activities I use down the stretch to get the students active again rather than just referring back to the same results again.

 

 

By Jon Oaks

College Math Instructor. Tech Enthusiast. Visionary. Creative Genius. But above all, I enjoy what I do. That is why I am a teacher. Because I like to teach.

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