This three-act math task* activity from Dan Meyers begins with the following video (ACT ONE):

Asking your students to spend some time writing down what they notice and what they wonder will generate a lot of opportunities to explore this situation mathematically.

Then you can either explore your students’ questions or use the ones Dan Meyer wrote:

How many Starburst packs have exactly one yellow Starburst? Two yellow Starbursts? (the man really does not enjoy yellow Starbursts)

To help students explore these questions, he has prepared an ACT TWO with additional information. Don’t just give students the additional information right away. Instead ask them what information they could use to answer the question. This will help them work on making sense of the problem before they start making any calculations.

Finally, the activity has an ACT THREE, with the answer (in either video or photograph form), additional questions push students who are ready to go further with the math, and discussion questions for helping students reflect on the math.

Follow the url link above to find all of the materials needed for this activity.

College and Career Readiness Standard: Understand that statistics can be used to gain information about a population by examining a sample of the population; generalizations about a population from a sample are valid only if the sample is representative of that population. Understand that random sampling tends to produce representative samples and support valid inferences. (Medium Emphasis)

*For more support on using Three-Act math tasks in adult education math classes, read Inspiring Student Curiosity: What’s real about real-world math?