Determining the probability of a good day for sowing cotton

• This teacher resource is highly valuable for a number of content description in the Year 10 strand of Statistics and Probability. It presents a real life context that might confront a cotton farmer and supports students to maniplate the actual data in order to calculate reasonable probabilities.
• This resource is valuable for students to be introduced to a practical application of a number of data representations, classifying variables as either dependent or independent and conditional probability. The first task in the resource introduces how to manipulate data in spreadsheets. The conditional formatting function in Excel is used to support students to identify good days for sowing and spreadsheet formulae are used to count these days. This task also uses scatter graphs) to determine linear trends in data. The second task investigates Venn diagrams and two-way tables and notation used to describe sets of data. The third task requires students to use relative frequency to determine experimental probabilities applying the concept of dependence and independence by using Venn diagrams, two-way tables and tree diagrams.
• It also provides a content for students to build skills in the Digital Technologies curriculum as it relates to analysing and visualise data to model real life outcomes and would provide opportunities to extend findings by creating online data models.
• The resource has strong links to the Food and Fibre elements of the Design and Technologies curriculum and would provide a very valuable resource for students studying agriculture specialisations in Years 10, 11 and 12.
• The resource is also very valuable for the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capability particularly in relation to investigating with ICT to select and use advanced tools and techniques to generate precise data and information.

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