I was really excited to teach my Algebra Honors students about scatter plots and lines of best fit today.  I have been looking forward to this lesson because it allows me to teach statistics, which I love, to my students but also because we were going to use for the first time the HP Prime graphing calculator app on their iPads.  I knew I wanted to make this lesson interactive working with data they collected that would be interesting to them.  I found a PowerPoint that had 20 pictures of celebrities and students were supposed to guess their ages.  The students loved seeing pictures of Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, Nick Jonas, etc. and guessing their ages.  It definitely grabbed their interest!  I was feeling really confident about this lesson.  I then gave students the actual ages of the celebrities.  Students now had two rows of data and it was time to have some fun with the HP Prime.

Mistake #1:  I had thought that the HP Prime app was automatically downloaded on all freshmen iPads but I never checked with the students prior to class if this actually was the case.  Some students had it but many did not.  I thought this was easily fixed, the app was free, the students could just download it.  For the majority of students this worked but there were 3 students that were unable to download any apps. They unfortunately had to just watch on with a partner.

Mistake #2:  The HP Prime calculator is very different from the TI-84 calculator and there is a learning curve.  I had budgeted some time to play around with the basic functions of the calculator before we started the activity.  I was thinking of the first time I used the HP Prime at a conference last summer and how I was intimidated to push buttons randomly so I waited for the instructor to walk me through step by step initially.  What I didn’t anticipate was students feeling much more comfortable with new technology and have them start pushing all the buttons and not paying much attention to my tutorial.  This resulted in many students asking me how to do the same things over and over.

Mistake #3:  Once I got everyone back on track and stressed the importance of staying with me while we entered data we started creating our scatter plot.  Students did great entering their two columns of data but as soon as I showed them how to graph the points they immediately got excited about the touch screen of the graph and started going off in a bunch of different directions.  This resulted in a similar replay of mistake #2.  It was fine at first that they were playing around with zooming in on their window but when it became time to sketch a graph with their finger many instinctively hit OK which then saved their line – even if it was a line they didn’t feel represented their data well.  Rather than ask for help they continued to draw multiple lines which I had to walk around and delete.

While we did finish the lesson and I think I demonstrated to my students that the HP Prime calculator is superior to the TI-84, the lesson did not go at all how I envisioned or wanted.  In hindsight I think it might have worked out better if I gave students written step-by-step instructions for how to enter the data and do the functions working in their groups.  I then could have circulated around the room to see how things were going and troubleshoot if needed.  The girls are way more comfortable with technology than I gave them credit for and I think they could have figured out what I wanted them to do working together.  We then could have had a class discussion on the different lines of fit each student created and discussed the similarities of them.  Overall I would do things differently but I am glad that we approached scatter plots this way rather than just completing problems in the textbook in a more traditional sense.