Voices from the Field > Classroom Video 4
Voices from the Field: Using Open-Ended Task and Dynamic Simulation Tools
Understanding students’ conceptual development and, recognizing, anticipating, and interpreting students’ reasoning are essential when planning and teaching with tasks that are open-ended. In open-ended tasks, students have a lot of freedom to choose how to produce a solution and support their work with appropriate evidence and arguments. This video gives an opportunity to consider how a simulation can be used to collect data from a random number generator that is based on some unknown probability distribution. This video is an animated depiction of the work of two real students from a sixth grade classroom as they used the simulation tool to work with the Schoolopoly task to decide whether or not a die is fair. It will be useful to read and investigate the task itself before watching the video.
Guiding Documents
A PDF of the task used in this video. The task has been used in many research and classroom contexts from sixth grade through AP Statistics. | Schoolopoly Task |
A link to more information about the technology tool used in this video. | TinkerPlots |
A zipped folder containing the six TinkerPlots files that are set up with the six different probability distributions for the die companies in the Schoolopoly task. | TinkerPlots Files |
A zipped folder containing six Fathom files, one for each die company in the Schoolopoly task. | Fathom Files |
The following questions can be used to guide discussion around this 4:23 minute video:
- As students engaged in the task, what different choices did you see them make that seemed to impact their progress on obtaining a solution and making a claim about whether the die was fair or not.
- How did the simulation tool afford or constrain their work on this task?
- How was students’ reasoning impacted by the dynamically changing graphs and table of data as the simulation was running?