License Plate Combinations

When we come back from winter break we normally start our probability and statistics unit. I normally take a week for probability and a week for statistics which normally melts into three weeks. I've always thought nothing of changing it, but during winter break Dan Meyer posted "Plates Without States"  Since we were going over permutations and combinations I thought this would be an excellent way to get students thinking about how many different combinations there are in license plates and why they make them like that.

To start the lesson I had students go through Dan Meyer State-Plate Game.  Students were definitely engaged and loved playing against each other in their groups.

Next we talked about license plates and I separated it from combinations and permutations.

I gave all of the students a blank license plate and a card. The card had a name of a city or state and a population that students had to take in consideration.

Here are some of the license plates that students were working on.

When students were done with their license plates, they took a picture of their license plate and put it on SeeSaw. The last part they had to do was comment on three others the number of different combinations that they had with their license plate.

Here were a few students figuring out and commenting on other students post.

I like this activity much more and students realized how license plates play a role in local governments and how the population of an area can control the different license plates possible.

I posted almost all of them in the back of my room here are a bunch of different ones that are posted.