Sampling. Teacher's Guide

Abstract

This document is the fourth of seven units developed by the Math Network Curriculum Project. Each unit, designed to be a 2-week module, is a teacher's guide which includes detailed directions along with the courseware and software needed. Teacher intervention in the non-computer activities that begin each unit is required, and the consistent use of small-group instruction makes the units usable in a standard classroom if two microcomputers are present. The Sampling Unit explores the use of sampling to make predictions about total populations. It begins with some concrete sampling activities and a computer sampling activity, the Guess My Bag program, designed to give the students some intuition about the relation of facts about a part of a population to facts about the whole. At the end of the unit, students set the evening schedule for a television network in a computer program called Prime Time. Their schedule will compete, via the phone network, with other classes' schedules. For this concluding activity, the Network Prime Time computer program and the telephone modem are used. The programs were developed for use on a Commodore PET Computer with at least 16K of RAM using 4.0 BASIC. Printed copies of the code for the three computer programs are included. (MNS)