Gummy Bear Catapults

Recently, my statistics students have been doing an activity with gummy bear catapults.

Sometimes I wonder what my principal think I am teaching in statistics.  The last time he walked in my stats class unannounced, my students had the desks pushed apart, and they were in the floor, catapulting gummy bears. They offered to let him catapult a gummy bear, but he refused.    

We built our catapults from popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and a pencil.

We tested the catapult on varying stacks of books to determine if that made a difference in the distance traveled.

I learned so much about my students’ current understandings of statistics by eavesdropping on their conversations while working through these sort of data collection activities.