My Price Is Right Flop

I have a small group of juniors and seniors (5-8 on any given day) and I am doing project based math learning with them.  I like teaching this way, but I have to be more flexible.  I am not good at estimating the time it will take them, so I have to be okay with things finishing early (and have something else on hand) or things running over to the next class.

On Monday, we looked at the letters in Wheel of Fortune.  We read small excerpts of books and tallied the letters and found the percents and the top 10 letters and bottom 5 letters.  The kids did well with this.  It took a long time.

Today, we looked at the games on Price Is Right.  We talked about what they knew about Price Is Right, not much.  I showed them a youtube video of the C'mon down to contestants row.  I only had 5 kids in class today but we played contestant's row anyways.  I put all their names in a bucket and picked them and order was important.  I gave them little white boards and one by one they bid on 3 different items.  They were starting to get it but struggled a bit with the idea of "closest without going over" and why $1 over another bid would be a good strategy.

Then, I asked the school to unblock some game sites and we played three games - Price Is Right Strategies.  I wanted them to play The Clock Game 10 times and record their wins and losses.  Then, I wanted them to play Plinko and record the money they won.  Next, play Cliffhanger and record wins and losses.  I wanted them to play each 10 times so it was be easy to figure out their percent of wins and losses.  You would have thought I told them to run 10 miles.  They were so competitive and wanted to quit when they weren't winning.  "This stupid.  I rather take a quiz."  They were all having a grumpy day and feeding off each other.  It wasn't pretty.

My intention was to have them play each 10 times, then tell them some strategies and play them 10 more times and see if they did better.  We didn't get this far.  I had lost them.  I told them the strategies but at this point they didn't care. 

I told some different students who stayed after for extra help and they thought it sounded wonderful. 

I will see this class again on Friday and am just ready to give them worksheets.  They want Chinese food.  It will have to be somewhere in between worksheets and Chinese food.  I was thinking Press Your Luck, but now I am not sure. 

Teacher's Price Is Right