Mairead's Reflection:
This activity worked well. I think they felt a little overwhelmed because they had to work on the project this week as well but other than that there were no major issues. I took Allison's suggestion and gave them only 8 mins at the end of class to collect the data and then sent them away to work on the Quantitative analysis - one girl made an interesting point - she showed that her data was not a function and therefore couldn't be a linear function! We'll have to come back to the subtleties of well-modeled by a linear function versus being a linear function but I thought it was great that she spotted that her data wasn't a function!!! I had them discuss their quantitative analysis at the beginning of the next class and then continue on with the activity - most had gotten to finding an equation for their line before leaving so I sent them away to visualize in Mathematica and finish the activity. I'm collecting it on Monday so we'll see how they did. I have to try to get this one back to them pretty quickly I think so that they have it when they start working on their project stage 2.
After collecting them and grading them I realized that many students were not understanding why we were visualizing using Mathematica. They were coming up with models, visualizing them with Mathematica and then not realizing that when their line was way off of their data that they should correct their model. This was the main mistake. The reason lots of their models were off was because they were picking two data points randomly and not two points actually on the line that they had drawn. I talked to them as a class when handing it back about the purpose of visualizing in Mathematica as a step in their modeling so we'll see if that gets through or not in project stage 2.