Today we were building our familiarity with the normal distributions. I had a scan of a textbook page with lots of normal distribution sketches, like the one below. I copied them onto yellow card and cut them out, discarding the textbook’s instructions and numbering.
Each student got a sketch and I asked them to make up a normal distribution question to go with it. Here are my instructions. Students were working on their mini whiteboards.
The students got out of their seats to solve other their classmates’ problems. There was a lot of collaboration and those who found writing the question hard got plenty of input from their peers. I was free to circulate and able to clarify some important ideas about continuous distributions and the appropriateness of the normal distribution as a model.
I was impressed by the questions’ variety and ingenuity.
I don’t think I emphsized thoroughly enough that students need to specify that the data they have chosen to write about is normally distributed. However, students were able to solve a wide range of questions, some more difficult than others.
This was definitely much more successful than a page of textbook questions!