Winning the Lottery (Investigation)

Lesson

Congratulations you've just won \$400000 from the lottery! What will you spend your money on?

Objectives:

To explore decimals in a real world situation
To practice adding and subtracting decimals
To practice estimation with decimals
To practice multiplying decimals by whole numbers or powers of 10

Materials:

Internet
Calculator
Paper
Pen

Investigate!

What items would you want to buy with your winnings? Make a list of these items and look up the price of each.
Order your items from least to greatest price.
Estimate the total cost of all of your items together. Based on this estimate do you think you have enough money to buy everything on your list? Why or why not?
What fraction of your winnings would you spend on the most expensive item on your list?
How much would it cost you to buy 15 of your favorite item on your list?
How much would it cost to buy 100 of this same item?
Can you afford to buy this much with your winnings why or why not?
If you planned on saving 25% of your winnings how much money would you have to spend? Could you still buy any of the items on your list? Which ones?

Questions:

Were you able to buy more or less items than you expected with the currency($,400000) you won? Why?
Compare with a friend! How many items were they able to buy with the same amount of money? Who bought more? Why?

Outcomes

7.DH.DH.4

Feel of probability using data through experiments. Notion of chance in events like tossing coins, dice etc. Tabulating and counting occurrences of 1 through 6 in a number of throws. Comparing the observation with that for a coin.Observing strings of throws, notion of randomness.