Does your iPod Play
Favorites?
Have you played your iPod on shuffle and heard songs by the same artist
either back to back or within a short time frame?
Predict how likely it is to get repeated artists in a playlist of 15 randomly
selected songs.
Using the attached iPod playlist, generate the random list of numbers by
reading 3 digits at a time from a provided table and match them to the
numbered song in the playlist
Did you have a repeated artist?
Compare your repeated artist results to your class.
What surprised you?
What happens if your playlist is only 30 songs? 50 songs? 1000?
Source:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/36583
https://www.causeweb.org/webinar/activity/2009-06/2009-06.ppt
Materials needed:
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personal iPod playlist—made by copying all the songs out of iTunes (organized by artist name)
and pasting them into an Excel file and assigning each a song number.
random number table—out of a statistics book or Google “random number table” to print
graphing calculators—for summarizing frequency of repeated artists (0, 1, 2, etc.)
Discussion Questions:
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Did any of your repeated artists happen back to back?
Compare what would happen
o In my 500 song playlist I have 25 songs each from my two favorite artists.
o My friend has 500 songs from 475 artists.
o What kind of repeated artists would be expected from each set?
o Would your expectation fit the randomness of the iPod shuffle?
In the above source PowerPoint, the author created a histogram of the frequencies of repeated artists.
You should do this with the student data to help the students see how the data is distributed.