Classroom resources spotlight: Licorice Lines

Published 05 September 2018

In our new Year 3 classroom resource, students make playdough licorice sticks by hand and with a machine, then create dot plots showing the mass of each licorice stick. They discover that their data is more "spread out" for the handmade licorice—the machine-made licorice displays much less variation. In the second lesson students design strategies to create identical licorice sticks. 

The focus of this sequence is learning about variation, which is at the centre of statistics. Without variation, there is no statistics!

Check out the Licorice Lines sequence here, and don't forget to email us at mbi@science.org.au to let us know how your trial goes.