Do The Math
On a rain-drenched December evening in Jackson, Mississippi, a multicultural crowd files into the Crown Room of the Clarion Hotel for a formal dinner honoring math educators. The room is dressed up in typical ballroom style: A podium is set for speeches, and round tables decorated with white tablecloths and candles await a sumptuous meal. But something decidedly unconventional has taken over the parquet dance floor: Carnival-esque booths snake around its perimeter.
The setup is unusual, but the guests are into it. Teachers, state government workers, lawyers, activists, parents, and students all line up eagerly to try their luck at various games. At one stall, participants are using probability to calculate their chances of rolling a specific combination on three color-coded dice. It looks like a craps game—except for the people scribbling X’s and Y’s on scraps of paper before they place their make- believe bets with a “banker.”
At another booth, Sammie Myers, a lighthearted and outgoing
21-year-old, is manning a hula hoop activity. “This is an
averaging game,” he says, grabbing one of the plastic circles
lying haphazardly on the floor in front of him. He explains that,
during three rounds, three groups of people will compete to see how
fast they can step through the hoops. In each succeeding round, the
allotted time will increase, and participants will note how the number
of people who run through the hoops varies. With a graphing calculator,
they’ll then plot their data and perform a linear regression to
determine a line of best fit, which illustrates trends in the data.
Armed with this information, they’ll try to predict what will...
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