Absolute Value Project

I was looking for a project on Absolute Value and came across Dan Meyer’s blog post called Guess
the Eggs. I love any activities that allow all students to participate and feel like they have a stake in
the final outcome, but I knew that I would have to adapt this activity to include more of our
curriculum standards. So I counted out some jelly beans and set up this station in my classroom:

Over a two day period, I polled my students, STEM colleagues, and school Admin team. I’ve never
been so happy to have such a ruckus in my homeroom before school actually began with students
arguing their guesses and calculation methods.
For the actual lesson, all students downloaded the Excel file and we began to analyze the results. My
9th graders decided pretty quickly that we weren’t playing by Price is Right rules, meaning it didn’t
matter whether someone guessed over or under the actual number of jelly beans… which led them
immediately to the concept of Absolute Value #teacherwin.
There were 1472 jelly beans in the container, so we all typed in the equation =abs(C2-1472) and
populated the rest of the column. I asked students what they thought a graph of (Guess, Distance
from Actual Number) would look like, and students overwhelmingly thought we were about to see a
graph with data scattered every which way.
All eyes were on the board as I highlighted the data, clicked the insert tab, and chose the 1st
scatterplot option…

There were many “What?! How?!” comments as students digested the graph before them. They
immediately wanted to know if the graph would always be in that shape, and this led us into our
discussion of graphing absolute value functions and describing their characteristics.
For your Absolute Value Project, choose a question and ask at least 50 humans.

Criteria:
1. Question must have a correct answer
2. Answer must be numerical
3. Question must be something interesting to student
4. Answer must not be something that most people already know

Design a poster in Microsoft Word (or you can make an actual poster) showcasing the results of your
experiment highlighting the characteristics (Function, Domain, Range, etc…) of your absolute value
function.

On a separate page, include your data any assumptions or research you did in the planning of your
project and an analysis including any predictions you made and a conclusion based upon your
findings.