Right Wing Nation

If you drink the “fuzzy math” and “discovery math” kool-aid, here is your reality check.

Parentalcation has an article up about that High Tech High I commented on earlier, and in the article, he points to several classroom assignments created by Microsoft. The first is (supposedly) a math lesson, titled, “Making Money from Lemons,” and being the curious sort I am, I cruised over to the Microsoft site to look at the assignment.

Here are the directions from the Microsoft page:

In This Lesson: 
Teacher Overview
Classroom Resources
Academic Standards
Setting the Stage
Student Directions
Assessments
Extensions

Teacher Overview

Students set up a virtual lemonade stand. Students start the game with $20. Each day, they must decide how many cups of lemonade to prepare, select the ingredients, and decide how much money to charge for each cup. Students base their decisions on production costs and the weather forecast, which sometimes are inaccurate. The game simulates customer behavior, and students record their decisions and outcomes in an Excel sheet. After 10 days, they find out if they have made a profit.

Classroom Resources: Student Directions (24.5 KB Microsoft Word file) 

Save this document to your classroom computer. Adjust the directions as needed for your lesson. When presenting your lesson to other students, ask them to use the student directions sheet as a starting point for the WebByte.

Excel Data Collection Sheet (14 KB Microsoft Excel file) 
Use this Excel data sheet in this lesson to record decisions and outcomes of the game.

This assignment already seems bizarre. The topic of the assignment — running a lemonade stand — seems juvenile, yet Microsoft (or whoever wrote this) introduced two advanced variables into the problem (and does anybody know what a WebByte is, or how it pertains to this assignment?) Does anybody see them?

The first one is the weather forecast, which is sometimes inaccurate. This introduces uncertainty — probability — into the problem, and it seems to me, anyway, that kids young enough not to be offended by a lemonade stand problem are most likely not well versed in calculating or modeling probability.

The other is even thornier. The students are supposed to model customer behavior (” … the game simulates customer behavior …”) and modeling behavior is, well, highly complex. And once again, modeling customer behavior requires probability.

This is the type of problem that would require a Monte Carlo simulation — and the statistical knowledge to set up the model and interpret the outputs — to solve, but hey, maybe I’m just being anal retentive. So let’s go on, and check out this assignment in further detail:

Setting the Stage

Tell the students to go into the lemonade stand business. Each of them will own their own business and make decisions about materials, costs and how to make the lemonade. They should also know that even if they have really good tasting lemonade, sometimes the weather affects how much lemonade people buy. They will get to see a weather forecast, but they should keep in mind it isn’t always accurate.

No further information there (and no weather forecast anywhere), but the directions above contain links to the assignment itself and an Excel worksheet. So let’s first check out the assignment:

Student Directions for Making Money from Lemons

1. Open Internet Explorer and go to the website: http://www.coolmath-games.com/lemonade/.
2. Open your Excel data sheet for recording your information.
3. Before you begin your actual data collection, you might want to experiment with how the lemonade stand runs for a few days. Once you are ready, click on the “Bankrupt!” button to see your results and start the game over.
4. Record all the decisions you are making in your excel sheet. Also record your results.
5. Run your stand and record your data for 10 days.
6. After the 10th day, click on the “Bankrupt!” button to see your final results. Did you make a profit?
7. Save your Excel data sheet and open up a Microsoft Word document. Write the answers to the following questions:
   1. How did you do? Do you think your lemonade stand was successful?
   2. What did you learn from playing the game?
   3. Looking over your data, do you see any patterns?
   4. What advice would you give someone who wants to be successful at playing the game?

The assignment gives the student no data whatsoever — but it does point to yet another page, so let’s see if there are data to be found there:

Lemonade Stand Introduction

Hi, and welcome to Lemonade Stand! Your goal in this game will be to make as much money as you can within 30 days. To do this, you’ve decided to open your own business — a Lemonade Stand! You’ll have complete control over almost every part of your business, including pricing, quality control, inventory control, and purchasing supplies. You’ll also have to deal with the weather, which can be unpredictable. Unfortunately, the weather will play a big part when customers are deciding whether or not to buy your product.

Other factors which will make or break your business is the price you charge. Customers are more apt to pay higher prices when the product (your lemonade) is more in demand - When the weather is hotter. As the temperature drops, and the weather turns bad (overcast, cloudy, rain), don’t expect them to pay nearly what they would on a hot, hazy day.

The other major factor which comes into play is your customer’s satisfaction. As you sell your product, people will decide whether or not they like it, and how much they like or dislike it. As time goes on, they’ll start to tell their friends, neighbors, and relatives (hence, your ‘popularity’). Sell a good product for a good price, and you’ll build business over time; overcharge for inferior products, and you’ll be out of business sooner than you’d think. Another more direct form of customer satisfaction affecting sales takes place directly at the stand. As customers buy your product, you’ll see some tell you what they think by the bubbles over their heads. If customers are enjoying their product, others are more likely to buy. If they’re expressing their dissatisfaction, other customers are more likely to take their business elsewhere.

If you’d like more hints and tips on running a successful lemonade stand, be sure to visit the author’s homepage! =)

Note that the only data students are given here is that they’re supposed to model their sales over thirty days — though there is a cute, supportive, nurturing, matriarchal, happy little education school smiley at the end (I guess that cute little smiley is supposed to make up for the idiocy of this assignment, or maybe it’s to make the students feel like they’re as idiotic as the person who wrote this). Also note that the original Microsoft assignment specifies ten days. Which is it? So I downloaded and opened the Excel worksheet, thinking perhaps the data were there, but they are not. The worksheet contains no data, nothing but labels.

How, exactly, are students supposed to do anything with this idiotic assignment? In order to do this, students have to know quite a few variables, such as any of the following:

• How many lemons does it take to make a glass of lemonade?
• How much sugar does it take to make a glass of lemonade?
• How much do lemons cost?
• How much does sugar cost?
• How many glasses of lemonade will we sell per day on average?
• How does pricing affect sales, since students choose their own prices?
• How does the weather forecast affect the sales?

There are probably others (that last one is actually a set of variables, and not just one), but you get the idea. This is a waste, a pointless assignment. Students cannot work this assignment in any meaningful way. What are they supposed to do, make up all the data? How are students supposed to model customer behavior? The list goes on and on.

But this isn’t just a bad assignment; it’s a moonbatty, educration-y assignment. It gives the students none of the data they require to do the assignment, but note that the assignment lists those mandatory discussion questions! Never mind that students will have nothing meaningful to discuss, I suppose. This “assignment” would get a grad student in an education school an A, no doubt.

This is exactly why “creativity” is such a brain-dead canard. There is nothing meaningful in this assignment, but no doubt it will spark student “creativity”! Frankly, I’m disappointed; I would have expected more than this idiocy from Microsoft. Perhaps nobody at Microsoft looks at these “assignments,” but merely solicits them from idiot teachers and throws them up on their website. Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking on my part.

If this is the sort of crap students are wasting their time doing in math classes, it’s no wonder undergraduates can’t calculate a break-even point, or even understand what one is without extensive explanation. This assignment is the exact equivalent of, “I have some apples and I’m going to give you a few, so how many apples do I have left?” This is worse than pathetic. This is inexcusable.

UPDATE: It turns out that there is a java app on the page (it didn’t run on my notebook when I first checked out the page), but this makes this “assignment” even worse. You click a button to tell it how many lemons, sugar, and ice to buy, then click another button and like magic, it tells you how much profit you did or did not make. So it turns out that this isn’t even a bad, or hideous excuse for a math assignment, because the students do no math of any kind whatsoever. They just click buttons. Shameful.

See here for a reality check — what Freshmen must do in the university classroom. More crap math here. And my take on the new NCTM standards here.