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.
