Have you ever thought of using food to teach Mathematics? Maybe not! I never thought that I could ever use M&M's so as to teach Data to my students. In my country, we call them Gems and they are only manufactured by Cadbury's. The good news is that most students in India don't have food allergies and we have still not reached the stage where parents would sue us if something untoward were to happen to their children.
There are various stages to using food in a mathematics class. Each stage is explained as follows:
Tuning In: Give one M&M packet to each group. Students look at the packet and answer questions such as “what colours are there in the packet?”, “how many will be there in each colour?”, “which colours will have more and which colours will have less?” This is a prediction exercise.
Finding Out: After the prediction exercise, the students open the packet and find the answers to the questions asked. They compare their speculative answers with the real answers.
Sorting Out: Once the students have determined the answers, they are asked to create a bar diagram using the information that they have. Students will have to create two bar diagrams, i.e. one that will show the ‘before’ information and another one that will show the ‘after’ information.
Going Further: Students are then asked to discuss amongst themselves the reasons for why certain colours have more while others have less. Also, students could find out why there is only ‘n’ number of colours instead of a larger choice.
I found that talking about ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ colours along with the difficulty of creating a wider variety of colours in food production helped students gain an insight into the notion of ‘profit’ in food production. (A little bit of Humanities – Economics)
Making Conclusions: Once students derive the answers to the above questions, they discuss and arrive at a consensus on the topic. Most often students realise that primary colours are more common while secondary colours are lesser in number. Indeed, red is the most common followed by teal/blue. Talking about the cost of food production helped the students to understand why these colours are more common.
Taking Action: Based on their findings, students then moved on to working on using MS Excel to create bar diagrams for other data based on Natural Disasters in Australia.
Using food to learn about the use of MS Excel for creating bar diagrams is an excellent method to introduce the mathematical topic - ‘Data’. However, as a teacher I had to ensure that my students had no allergies before I could do this. Indeed, I found that I could use biscuits and wafers M&M’s especially while teaching ‘tessellation’ to the students. From this exercise, I learnt that it always helps to teach using methods that students will relate to rather than attempting to force them into understanding concepts about data.
