We have just completed the Mario Kart Challenge with all of our Maths S1 and S2 pupils. Having borrowed a brand new Wii, 4 controllers and Mario Kart from the Consolarium at LT Scotland, we decided to build it into our Maths curriculum whilst also taking part in the national Mario Kart Challenge.

We decided to use Mario Kart Wii as a means of collecting data which could then be used to teach mean, median, mode and range. The activity was split over two lessons, and was structured as follows:

Lesson 1

Learning Intention

• to use Mario Kart Wii to collect data for statistical analysis

Success Criteria:

• I will be able to log the results from Mario Kart in a table

At the start of the lesson, we discussed the idea of logging the race results of 4 characters across 5 or 6 races (the number of races depending on the size of the class). Pupils voted on which characters we would be following, and drew up a table to log results e.g.

Pupils took it in turns to come out in groups of 4 and race against each other. Each pupil would race as one of the characters the class had chosen. Wii games work particularly well when linked to a decent projector or in our case, an IWB. In this way the whole class can easily watch what’s going on get behind those taking part in each race.

Mario Kart Wii awards points for the position in which players finish (1st = 15 pts, 2nd  = 12pts, 3rd = 10pts etc) and the class logged the points scored by the 4 characters in their table.

Once all pupils in the class have taken part in a 4 player race and the results had been logged, we moved onto individual time trials. The winner of each race got the opportunity to set a fastest time over 3 laps. We followed the Consolarium Mario Kart rules: Character = Mario, Track = Mario Circuit, Kart = Standard Kart. The top ten times have been posted around the department, and sent to Consolarium as entries in the competition.

The time trials were really just for fun, but there is plenty of scope for logging lap times and using them in time calculations.

We found that we could get through all of the above with classes of up to 24 pupils within a one hour period.

Lesson 2:

Learning Intention

• to learn about the mean, median, mode and range

Success Criteria

• I will know what is meant by the terms mean, median, mode and range
• I will be able use the data collected from the Mario Kart challenge to calculate the mean, the median, the mode and the range

This second lesson could be delivered in any appropriate way to teach the concept of mean, median and mode.

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gbl, mario kart, mathematics, Maths, mean, median, mode, range, statistics, wii