Travel Times (Part 1)

This Instructional Activity is a part of the Lesson 10, Unit 8, Grade 6. In this activity, students explore the idea of the mean as a measure of center of all the values in the data, using a dot plot to help them visualize this idea. Students determine the distance between each data point and the mean, and notice that the sum of distances to the left is equal to the sum of distances to the right. In this sense, the mean can been seen as "balancing" the sets of points with smaller values than it and those with larger values.