In this season of awards, the Friday Fave is thinking about movies, which have
gotten expensive. Back when the Fave was a child, why movies only
cost….
Well, what’s your guess?
Go ahead and formalize that guess with this week’s Friday Fave: Predicting Movie Ticket Prices. The first thing we’ll have you do is consider the general form of the relationship between time and ticket prices.
Sketch that relationship.
If you and your classmates are a typical collection of diverse-minded people, this simple act of sketching will generate something to discuss. In just the small sample above, we could talk about whether the relationship is linear or non-linear; whether it makes more sense to use discrete points or a continuous curve, and when (if ever) the relationship should end.
By the end of the activity, we’ll show you a whole lot more data, and we’ll ask you to identify an interesting feature of the graph, and to interpret its meaning in terms of movie ticket prices. Perhaps you and your classmates will be more like-minded this time.
Even if you don’t have a diversity of thought about what’s interesting, there’s something to talk about. What happened? Math helps you ask a question about economics, or maybe about technology, or cultural trends, or something else altogether.
Informal mathematical ideas leading to inquiry inside and outside of mathematics is the mission in Predicting Movie Ticket Prices, this week’s Friday Fave.
While you’re provoking thinking with data plots, give these other activities a look too: