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....

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

Gym
Seats
1144
1185
1236
1239
1259
1278
1298
1300
1350
1356

Upward bound students in action, engaged in doing mathematics.

UB students counting the gym seats A UB working intently on mathematics

Data from earlier classes:

GroupFindings
Rayleen, Anthony, Jolane, Ezra1169
Marson1209
Francis1219
Grace1224
Coltrick1229
Atius1260
Kiumy, Rileen1290
Marlynn1363
Marmihna1446
Weinberg1466
Jeffrit, Romple1644
Osten1686
Paula1963

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