Week of November 20-22

During this short week, the 3rd graders focused on the importance of analyzing data in order to make informed decisions. Now that we've looked at movie ratings and profits, we must figure out what this info tells us about each studio so we can make an informed decision about where to work!

The 4th graders worked on their carnival games. They made the games are slightly unfair, but they made sure that this won't be obvious to the players. Then, they played their own games to determine the experimental probability of winning and losing (see below)!

Some 5th grade classes continued to work on getting their game elements to move, while 5c learned a new datatype that will help keep these images onscreen. This datatype is called a Boolean. It performs a test and evaluates to true or false. Some examples of functions that produce Booleans are: <, > , =, and, or. 

I hope everyone has a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving!!!

Week of November 13-17

This week, some third graders learned about the difference between gross profits and net profits. They calculated the net profit of Pixar and Dreamworks movies by subtracting the budget from the gross profit. This will help us figure out which company is doing better financially. We also learned what it means to be "in the red." Soon, we will put all of this data together to decide which company to work for!

This student is calculating the net profit of recent movies.

In 4th grade, we revisited the question: what makes a game fair? We realized that in order for a game to be fair, each play must have the same theoretical probability of winning. Students were then given the challenge of creating their own carnival game based on chance that is slightly unfair (carnival owners have to make a profit)! They must be able to prove that the game is unfair by calculating the theoretical probability of winning and losing. I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with!

In 5th grade, we finally got some of our video game elements to move! We definied functions that take in the danger's and target's x-coordinate and either add or subtract 50 in order to move it left or right. Now, the problem is that they fly off the screen and don't come back! Our next challenge will be to keep them onscreen!

Week of October 30-November 3

This week, the 3rd graders learned that bar graphs are useful when trying to compare and contrast data. Now that they found the average movie ratings for the five most recent movies from each studio, they will use this data to create bar graphs. This will help us see which movies were most liked and which studio had the highest ratings. This info will be very useful when deciding which studio to work for!

In 4th grade, the students in 4b explored what it means for a game to be fair. We realized that the theoretical probability for each player to win must be equally likely in order for it to be fair. This will help us when creating our own games, because now we know how to find the theoretical probability of compound events. The students in 4a explored the probability of getting possible sums and products when rolling two dice. We realized that a table is really helpful when finding all possible outcomes!

The 5th graders finally saw how functions are necessary in order to get game images to start moving! We used the design recipe to solve a problem related to rocket-height at various times. We even figured out how to make the rocket go faster and slower. The one challenge we are still working on is getting the rocket to start at the top of the screen and move down.