[squeakland] Coke v Sprite - How can we use this to help kids get in the habit of modeling problems?

[Steve Thomas]

So Dan Meyer posted a fun video <http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=9553> where you
had a glass of Coke and a glass of Sprite and then he took an eye dropper of
Sprite and put it in the Coke, then took an eye dropper from the Coke glass
and put it back into the Sprite glass. Then he asked "which glass contains
more of the original soda". I made two attempts to model this problem in
Etoys.

So I decided to try and figure a way to let kids model this problem in
Etoys. My first attempt used
kedama<http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10579> to
show the "soda molecules" moving around and let the kids move the soda into
the eye dropper and then into the coke glass and back.

Then decided on using a simpler
approach<http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10581>using
a set of 10 Sprite boxes in a container and 10 Coke boxes in a
container.  And asked the kids to move the 2 Sprite boxes into the Coke
container, then shuffle the Coke container and take the top four boxes and
move them back to the Sprite container.  And have them do this a few times
and think about how this relates to the Coke v Sprite problem.

I also created a Blog Post with some videos
here<http://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2011/03/coke-v-sprite-have-kids-build-model-of.html>
.

What to you think? How can we use this problem to help kids learn?

Stephen
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