Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Project # OSU-10-RET

1. Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Project # OSU-10-RET Project Motivation • Bring knowledge of engineering into the high school classroom • Build long-term collaborations between high school math teachers and OSU Industrial Engineering faculty • Promote STEM education among high school students • Encourage students to pursue Industrial Engineering (IE) Project Objectives • Expose participating teacher to real-world engineering problems involving transportation and logistics • Develop classroom materials and activities introducing, network flow, probability and statistics problems for use within secondary mathematics classes Project Activities • Collaboration between PIs and participating teacher to design statistics problems • Weekly meetings to discuss specific concepts in probability and statistics • Teacher participation in data collection and multi-variable regression for freight flow prediction Methodology • Study and develop learning materials on relevant topics in network theory • Study and develop learning materials on introductory probability and statistics topics in Operations Research (OR) • Study the role of these topics in addressing real-world problems through an ongoing project on developing a decision support system for transportation planning Outcomes • “Teacher kit” for high school classrooms • Classroom activities that encourage collaborative learning and student participation • Learning materials to introduce “new” math concepts • Hands-on experience, and a conceptual understanding of topics in network flows, probability and statistics germane to IE • Exposure for high school students to OR and IE • Website with classroom activities and teacher explanations Rolling the “Fair” Die The big idea: Many students have an expectation of occurrence of events. Many of these expectations are pre-conditioned toward fairness. Our view of the probability of an event occurring can be warped by our expectation. In this lesson, students will roll a six-sided die sixty times. Some of the students will expect to roll exactly ten of each number. Some will guess that the numbers may be near ten, but not necessarily exactly ten. The setup: Prepare enough dice from wooden blocks for each group to have a die. With some of the dice, drill out a hole and plug it with a fishing weight. You can choose to plug near a specific corner, near an edge, or near the center of a face on some. Leave many of the dice un-loaded. Fill the holes with wood putty and paint the surfaces of all of the dice. Number the sides of the dice. You might number the loaded dice with different colors so that they can later be distinguished. Discussion: After the students complete the worksheet, a buzz should be created about the results that did not lead to their expectation. The goal is to impress upon the students that the probability for a die rolling a 1 comes from the experience of that die being rolled, not from what we assume it should be. We often assume fair opportunities without stating that assumption explicitly. This concept will appear again when binomial probabilities are discussed. RET Continuation in 2010 • Funding for the third year will support refinement of the teacher kits on network flows, and the development of new kits on counting principles and descriptive statistics including interactive applications with the TI-NspireTMCalculator TI-NspireTM Calculator Interactive Application Helping students develop an intuition for the concepts of mean, median, and variance, via an interactive application that enables them to see the effect of changes in the data on these quantities. www.myteacherpages.com/webpages/MThomas11/