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A Mean Murder Mystery III

It's been a while since I have last shared a murder mystery. So here is my Harry Potter themed murder mystery. The topic if you haven't guessed it yet is calculating the mean specifically from a table. Everybody loves a play on words, right?

This murder mystery was part of a lesson I did with my year 7's recently, I've wanted to spend the time in creating a good mean from the table lesson for a while. I started with a stopclock starter where students had to calculate the median, mode and range from lists and tables. This warmed the students up and refresh their knowledge of both grouped and ungrouped tables.

I introduced the murder mystery by asking the students to read the newspaper article which always gets a buzz in the classroom. Following this I displayed the four suspects Professor Snape, Sirus Black, Draco Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange. This information card also includes their individual stats.

Now the fun and games began, After some exploration and mini white board work we were ready to attempt solving the murder mystery. If students completed these quickly I had some challenging exam reasoning questions ready.

Clues one and two focus on students calculating the mean from an ungrouped frequency table. Students are then tasked with solving clues three and four which are calculating the mean from a grouped table.

Students have to presume that the murderer is the average person. At the end of the mystery we discussed this assumption in depth and they decided that the murder might only be the average person for some traits or may hold none of the average traits. One student argued "Well the average person doesn't just go around murdering people. So why would the murderer have the average traits." It's interesting to see how the classes logical, problem solving and reasoning minds work when discussing this.

Clue 1 - Students need to find the mean shoe size of the murderer to be able to rule out one of the four suspects.