All the materials developed by MALATI are in the public domain. They may be freely used and adapted, with acknowledgement to MALATI and the Open Society Foundation for South Africa.
The documents provided here are the teacher documents, consisting of the learner activities and accompanying teacher notes. We also include the rationale document for each content area, giving background on the underlying philosophy and design principles.
mission: the math literacy project provides opportunities for students to achieve in a college preparatory mathematics curriculum so that they may gain access to educational, economic, and social resources that will lead to individual empowerment, independence, and social justice.
In this activity, students conduct an investigation to determine the rate of change in the popping of microwave popcorn. Four volunteers will estimate the time in the popping process where the rate of change is at 5 chosen levels. Other students will collect data on number of pops during consecutive 5 second time periods and draw histograms. Students will understand the approximate normal curve for a real data set and the relationship between the rate of popping and the shape of the distribution. This activity also provides an opportunity for students to understand human errors in data collection because not everyone will have the same number of frequencies in the corresponding classes of their histograms.
Mathematics is used in interesting, and often less than accurate, ways. Newspapers present graphs showing apparently correlated variables, but with a little thought, some of the time you will find that whilst it looks like two variables are connected, there is actually no cause and effect. Sometimes this is because there is a third factor causing the movements in the variables - for example, if it is hot and sunny, sales of sunscreen lotion increase, as do sales of air-conditioners. If you plot these sales against each other, you find a correlation. However, they are only connected because of a third variable, the summer weather. Of course, an unscrupulous media can draw connections where they don't exist for more political ends, such as blaming an increase in crime on the sales of hooded sweatshirts. And politicians have been known to confuse cause and effect, thinking that a local crime increase is due to the increased police presence, rather than the other way around.