AP Statistics Students Apply Skills in Bungee Barbie Lab

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  • Krishna Shamanna ’19 and Kyra Kornfeld ’18 measure the length of the Barbie.

  • Krishna Shamanna ’19 waits to drop the Barbie from the bridge.

  • Maggie Sager ’19 looks towards the other groups’ Barbies.

  • Barbie hangs by her bungee.

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The AP Statistic students completed their Bungee Barbie lab this past week. This lab goes along with the class’ current unit of scatterplots and regressions. The activity consisted of students finding the distance the Barbie would “bungee” with a varying amount of rubber bands, first on a small scale in the classroom.

“It gave a real life application of what we do in class which is rare,” Maggie Sager ‘19 said. “It helps us understand more exactly what the equations mean. We actually get to see the math line up in real life.”

The lab was pretty straightforward, but if the Barbie hit the ground, then she would be considered dead. From the data of the distance per number of rubber bands the students collected in the classroom, they were able to predict how many rubber bands would be needed to get the doll as close to the ground as possible without killing her. After the students made their predictions of how close Barbie would come to the ground, they went to the bridge connecting the upstairs D and E wings to launch Barbie and test whether the predictions were accurate.

“Any time we can create data in the real world and then reuse that to reinforce learning is important,” AP Statistics teacher Mr. Jason Ziebell said. “This lab by itself is no more important than any other lab we do, but it is really important that students get a chance to see how statistics are used with real data. The book problems don’t give them the same experience as going out and creating the data by their own hands and finding the pitfalls of that. Because people don’t complete the lab in the same way, there are immediate repercussions they don’t get to see in a book.”

The AP Statistics students will continue to further their knowledge throughout this year with more labs and activities in preparation for the AP test in May.