Steve Weissburg from Ithaca High School has contributed a really great linear modeling problem for Algebra I. He has students model the populations of India and China over time. Kids collect the data, create a scatter plot, draw a line of best fit, come up with slopes, units, etcetera. Eventually, they predict the year in which India’s population overcomes China’s.
To put it mildly, this is a great project. If you want a performance based task to really have kids explore a very real linear modeling scenario, this is the ticket.
I’m creating a new Forum category called Algebra I Projects and Labs for these types of materials. Thank you Steve for contributing it! I hope we can get more from others as the curriculum develops.
Here are both the activity and the key: