Relating Math to Science

Like scientists, mathematicians have questions that they want to find the answer to.  They propose a question, come up with a list of possible responses, then survey their audience by collecting data with tally marks.  We then make up a graph to communicate our results, using mode, median and mean to analyze what we found out.  This week, the students collected data about a packet of M&M's.  They sorted and classified, tallied and recorded, then showed their results in either a pie graph or bar graph.  We identified the mode in their graph (the number that occurs the most) and will be working on finding the median (middle number in the results), mean (average) and range (difference between least and most).