Panda Populations

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) wants to determine the population of Panda bears. We will help them by “capturing” some pandas to tag.

Collect a handful of beans from your container of black beans. Count how many beans you collected and substitute an equal number of white beans back to your container. These white beans represent the tagged pandas.

Shake up your container to simulate the pandas moving about their habitat.

Now “recapture” samples of the panda population to estimate the total population by taking handfuls of your bean mixture and scaling it up to the whole population. Replace the sample after each trial.

Record your data in the table below.

Trial Number / Number of White Beans / Total Number of Beans / Ratio of White to Total / Population Estimation
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Based on your trials, how many pandas do you think are in your population? Why?

In 1960, WWF re-captured 10 samples with a mean relative frequency of 0.12. Does this data support a conclusion that the panda population has declined between 1960 and your current population estimation? Justifying using statistics, graphs, and plots as needed.

ATTENTION: The majority of this task is appropriate for 7th Grade Mathematics. During this transition year, you may want to use this to help your students understand sampling from a population. The last question is what gets at the Secondary III core.

Sources: http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L721

Materials:

·  Black/Brown beans

·  White beans

·  Containers for each student (or pairs as you see fit)

·  sticky notes

Notes:

After each student or pair has estimated their population, have students record their white to total relative frequencies on 10 sticky notes to create a class histogram. This will be important to complete the last question where they are comparing the 1960 information to the “current” population estimation.