Fill Your Pockets

Summary

In order to assess the student’s ability to compute with decimals, students were tested in a real­life scenario. In this collaborative project, students in two different classrooms at different schools were doing the same project. Students explored, researched, and built actual shipping containers for Goldfish crackers. Students were given a budget of $20 to ship 25 crackers to a peer group in the other class. Any money that was left over after paying for materials and actual shipping costs (found on the online USPS Postal Calculator) was a “profit” for that group. If any Goldfish crackers broke, money was deducted from their profit. Students were given complete control over their budget, as long as they understood that they may have a problem if all of their money was spent and any crackers broke. The students weighed and calculated the shipping cost as a part of their budget and then the packages were actually sent to the other class. Students that had differing levels of shipping (First Class, Express, etc) had different damage levels to their packages.

Once the packages arrived in the other classroom, the peer group had to evaluate the quality of the package and used a shared Google Doc to communicate the amount broken from the package and the profit that their peer group would receive. Then, using only the materials that were sent to them, they rebuilt the container to improve upon its shipping capability. Students then shared this new design through a Skype session and wrote reflections of the entire process. Students also Skyped and blogged with an industrial shipping expert to be better prepared for the experience.