Mairead's Reflection:
We got started on this on Wednesday. I spent some time on the first page talking again about what questions can be answered from data and this worked out well as I introduced the first project stage at the end of this class so I referred back to that conversation again when emphasizing that they needed to have a number input and a number output. In the discussion about the different types of predictions we could ask for I introduced the language of interpolation and extrapolation because we had both types of questions come up. Then I gave them a very brief intro to the activity (Just you will try to create data and then a graph of that data given the description of the way the population is changing). I went around and talked to a few people about the first one and then just let them work on. I stopped them 10 mins before the end of class to talk about the project and sent them home with the rest of the activity. So we will have to spend at least 10-15 mins talking about this activity the next day.
I went back to this activity and talked to the students about the data they had created - how they had been sure to have the necessary growth characteristic and what they graph looked at - we labeled things as increasing/decreasing, concave up/down as well as with many other ways of describing what the graphs looked like. On the concave up graph I added that it looked like a smile and one girl said "We can do that??? Use words like smile??" I thought that was cute - I told them that they could have used any words that they liked but in future I would expect them to be able to use concave up and down. One student was really bothered by labeling the decreasing functions as concave up and down as well - I'm still not sure that I convinced him it was ok. I didn't talk about 9 - 11 but instead collected them to grade. I also talked about the predictions in most cases. Overall I think it went pretty well.