This is a screenshot of a kids math question, I think it’s a terrible question as it doesn’t provide enough detail to definitely answer the question. My wife thinks it’s obvious as you can eye it. The answer agrees with her. I think it’s stupid.
What do you guys think is the answer and if it’s a good question.
https://files.ozbargain.com.au/upload/34092/118593/img_0860.…
Blue is about 50% of the circle, each yellow and red is about the same at 25%.
Agree with this logic.
If you cut the circle into two halves, roughly top and bottom.
2x blue + 1x red is greater than the bottom half
yellow + 2x red is less than the top half
Looking at the bottom half you can see there is more than 3x blue than red.
If you then assume two half circles are close enough equal. Assumption being half with blue is at least as big as half with yellow.
blue = half circle minus 1x red
yellow = half circle minus 2x red
Therefore more blue than yellow.
Assumption also strengthens this difference.
Question to check eyesight probable yeah. Question on maths, its stupid!
It is a maths question. The knowledge check here is to know that the longer the coverage of the parimeter, the more probable it is. So kids just need to take out thier tape measure and measure each color's total distance (testing addition with the red and blue). Then the longest answer is the answer.
Also for the OP, just because you arnt able to do something doesnt mean it is stupid. Only stupid people think that way because they assume they know everything.
Uh, what more detail do you need for this?
One colour clearly take up more space than the others
if the chart is hung up on the wall and the spinner is loose, then it will point straight down (its starting position). Then what is the answer?
Blue + Red = Purple.
I can clearly see the section under the arrow is a black line… ergo, answer is "black".
It's obvious that there is more blue than the other colours.
I don't think it's a bad question as it requires a bit of thought to work out that you need to add the different areas together rather than just taking the single biggest area (which is yellow)
I think his thinking is perfectly acceptable.
So equally likely.
Teacher: Sir, please answer red blue or yellow according to the preset answers.
Mr Wongington, I don’t have a red crayon
too subjective for a maths question.
there is absolutely nothing subjective about it at all
it's basic probability
So equally likely
You're wrong.
I think his thinking is perfectly acceptable
Now you're both wrong…
Think of it as a roulette wheel, it has 36 numbers on it instead of red and black and a single green it's laid out as follows;
9 of these numbers are red, 10 of them are yellow, and the remaining 17 are blue.
Now, tell me again… given those odds, what number are you going to place your bets on, the one with only 9/36 or the one with 17/36
yikes
It makes use of estimation, logic and the understanding of a circle. Your kid used some poor logic skills in their estimation.
The two blue make up slightly less than 50% of the circle. Yellow is 25%. You can automatically rule out the three being the same based on that alone, so your kid is missing a couple of key concepts from the get go. Red is maxing out at about 30% of the circle at that point, so it must be blue. Estimating that blue is smaller than yellow but there's two of them so they're the same is completely wrong. That's a spatial concept and it's not subjective at all. Yellow is 25% as it's a right angle. You don't have to be told numbers to estimate this.
You mention below that your kid is in grade one, so I can see it being a reasonable attempt albeit wrong because it misses a couple of key concepts (at least he didn't pick yellow). If your kid hasn't been taught anything about right angles or percentages then it'd be a struggle, but I assume it comes after studying those concepts in class.
Dunno why you think it's acceptable though, what are your math skills like?
I think yellow is clearly more than right angles so clearly more than 25%. But I think this why it is bad question, there’s nothing to indicate if it is or not.
Should I make a poll and about if the yellow is right angle?
@cloudy: Except it doesn’t change the answer. It’s close to a right angle, but even if it’s not then it needs to be a third for all three to be equal. It’s clearly not that big.
But if it was a third, it and the two red pieces equal less than 50%, therefore it would make those two red pieces less than 16%. The last red piece is roughly the same size, so there’s no way it is getting up to 33%, so blue is still larger.
It’s simple logic, you don’t need to know the sizes to estimate it, that’s the whole point. Walk through it a few times before worrying about the individual sizes.
When you look at the two blue put together and the one yellow, do they look about the same size to you? Or do they look vastly different?
the pecking order for intelligence in the household has been clearly established
assuming where the spinner stops is completely random, blue has the largest area
Not so fast Chief. Let's make up a real version of this, and hang it on the wall like a clock,(oriented as it is), and spin that needle.
The pecking order is one thing, but the upper hand intellectually? Guess who just hand balled the kids homework monitoring….
There are two top peckers in the house.
I immediately said yellow but then realized there were two lots of blues and three reds. Not a bad question as it requires some analytical thinking.
Same here, if I was given 5 seconds to answer I probably would have got it wrong. 10 seconds and it was easy.
what year is the child?
Nothing wrong with the question?
You'd be worried if any kid in school couldn't answer this question.
prep?
My kid is grade 1, I am not that worried as he is above average in maths (got 30/33 questions on a naplan), but couldn’t get this one.
Don't kids usually start naplan in year 3, not year 1?
It's extremely obviously blue, it's approximately 50% of the whole. Your wife is the smart one of the household.
Eh? Your wife is right. She's smarter than you. Listen to her more.
She's smarter than you
That was the goal when looking for wife, some may say it was a low bar
some may say
I believe you'll find that everyone is saying
It's more a spatial reasoning question- i.e. the ability to move and rotate shapes in your mind. Spatial reasoning is useful for geometry in mathematics and also very useful if you are a taxi driver. It improves a lot from 6yo to 12yo and so it's an appropriate question if the child is 12yo but not reasonable if they are 6yo. If your child can't do it but others the same age can then it may indicate that they need some help in this area.
The question might also have been asked so the kids don't just think of mathematics as rote learning timetables and writing equations.
…you reckon a kid needs to be 12 years old to answer this question? 12 year old are doing linear algebra or geometry, not looking at colours on a pie chart.
12 year olds are doing Kronecker products?
If your child can't do it but others the same age can then it may indicate that they need some help in this area.
Point me in the right direction, I’m clearly in the minority
Your kid not being able to do one question on a test is nothing to worry about. Tests add stress and stress makes you temporarily dumber than usual.
If you want your kid to know the answer then get some scissors and cut the pieces out. Put the pieces side by side to see which colour is the largest or alternatively stack the colours on top of each other to see which is the largest area. Then do a similar problem but without scissors and ask your kid to image cutting out the pieces and putting them side by side/stacked.
Spatial reasoning evolved for navigation, hunting prey and making tools. Do some similar stuff with your child. E.g. buy them a rubix cube, play jenga with them, let them navigate on the way to home/school or in a park/shopping centre. It also is used when moving liquids from one container to another. Make some cupcakes with your child and get them to estimate how many cupcakes can be made from one bowl of mixture.
My dad taught me spatial reasoning when I was a kid. We're go to a random suburb and walk around and take note of where different cars were. Later that night we'd go back and he would start the siphon and then I had to transfer the petrol to larger containers and 3D stack them in the van.
The answer is obvious but I'm not convinced it's a good maths question as it doesn't test any mathematical principle. It's basically a logic question, and it would be a lot easier to use something like a bar graph (with units) so that kids can actually add up the sums and be sure of something, rather than relying on a visual estimation.
I also think it's a question for 4-6 year olds and not suitable for giving out in school, unless the kids are literally dumb.
You're right that's insane.
Is This a Bad Kids Maths Question?
poll options
red, blue, yellow, equally likely
No, it is a bad poll.
Depends… is the spinner vertical as in the diagram? Gravity would dictate that where it is now is where it would stop.
Outside that, Blue is the answer, as it makes up almost half of the playing area. If this was a roulette wheel, I would bet Blue every spin. You wont win every spin, but your chances of landing on a blue section is a lot more than the other two.
BUT!! because I am a NERD! I am going to work it out using maths… And some CAD work :D
BRB!! nerds!
In theory, if you just had a ruler, you could calculate the width of the "pie pieces" at their widest point to determine relative size to the other pieces
Pfffft… not when I can just jam it into CAD and get the exact angles….
Ok, so, layering this under a CAD drawing, I get the following.
Each RED is 30 degrees. 30 x 3 = 90 degrees or 1/4 of 360 total. 0.25 or 25%
The Yellow is 100 degrees. 100 degrees or 0.2777… or 27.8% a little over 1/4
Each BLUE is 85 degrees. 85 x 2 = 170 degrees or 0.472… or 47.2%, a little under 1/2.
Red = 25%
Yellow = 27.8%
Blue = 47.2%
Busy day?
I don’t know what I expected but I can get on board with the dedication
If you had scissors you could cut out each piece, roll pieces from each colour into a ball and then eat the balls. The colour with the most chew is the largest.
Yep, agree… Or, you could mentally eyeball the fact that if you "mentally" remove the bottom red piece and slide blue together it makes up almost 50% of the entire circle… :/
Gravity would dictate that where it is now is where it would stop.
What if it was in deep space? Or in free fall in a vacuum? Or in an air tunnel? Or flat on earth but the spinner is magnetic?
@fantombloo: Then gravity would not apply?
But you are right. We ideally need to know the initial starting point for the spin, is it spun from this same spot every spin? The force at which it is spun at. The coefficient of wind drag and bearing friction. Is the arrow balanced or is is weighted more to the inside or the outside? Is the pointer fixed and is it the circle that spins?
Maybe OP is right.. I had not considered all the other variables.
I've changed my mind… Red is more likely.
Board of education review team: ok we did not expect this to get so messy
This is a clear question.
Print out the picture, cut it up and have the child put the pieces next to each other.
I don't feel the vibes that it can be anything other than Blue. Red can only be an answer if the diagram is not drawn to scale or some trickery is involved with the interpretation of the question.
Depends on how good Matt is at spinning
It's quite obviously Blue, because the Blue areas combined are bigger than the one Yellow area or three Red areas.
If you want, you could even try this yourself - take the shape, cut it out, and make a spinner. Do 100 spins, record each result, and see what the outcome is. Might be a nice afternoon activity with the kid, and a chance to teach them about forming hypotheses and experimentation.
Find me a kid, with a phone and with an attention span that reaches 100 spins of something not on a phone.
Is it bad math? No
Is it a bad question? No
Is it poorly represented? Possibly without context.
To explain:
It clearly meets CLT (cognitive load theory) requirements in that each element is labelled on the element. However, the stretch is in the separation of colours. Not ideal.
Therefore, you have to question is it about math (as in pure numbers) or is it about something else? As someone else pointed out, this is more to do with spatial reasoning - being able to eye a volume or mass and judge what it is and whether it is greater than or less than something else.
Without knowing, Im calling NAPLAN practice Year 3.
Year 3.
Why disrespect OP like this?
(I can appreciate the serious answer though).
I asked my kid. He answered "grey".
it doesn’t provide enough detail
You need to make whatever assumptions are necessary to give an answer, in school tests, e.g. pointer stops at a random angle.
Though at ATAR exam level, they should be more explicit.
This is what you'd see on an IQ test, rather than a maths test. NAPLAN 3 sounds right.
OP IT'S OBVIOUSLY BLUE. THERE ARE TWO OF THEM. IT TAKES UP HALF THE CIRCLE
Not if the wheel is vertical and stationary.Stop yelling, or you'll draw attention to your false conclusion.
Literally half the circle is blue. There are two remaining colours, red and yellow, which means in sum they must both be less than half.
But what if it's spinning? What if it's not flat? What if it's a windy day? What if Matt's colourblind? People who aren't good at thinking will come up with all sorts of explanations and excuses for why their bad maths is correct. It was exactly the same at school. Some idiot up the back would yell out "but what if the elephant can fly??" as if it was some genius contribution.
Here they're trying to work out if the kid can understand probability, not whether the kid can come up with some BS edge case.
We were asked our opinion mate.You got it. It's a crap maths problem (unless! the class actually had one of these 'spinners' and used it, so was familiar with it etc)
The question literally asked about where a 'spinning needle' would land, not which colours form the major part of the circle.
This looks like a fkn AI design test to me.
Class clowns are a whole different kettle of fish.
The question is valid. To me it's about estimating.
This question is proudly brought to you by Star Casino.
Can I just bet they’ll all have a good time?
subjective for a maths question.
It's not subjective at all.
What a shit question. It may be framed as maths, but it's a good introduction to (bad) English.
It's not going to land on anything. It's printed on the paper, no option to spin it.
I don't like these types of questions more because I question if you are really catching out people who do not understand probability or if conflated with those is a not insignificant number that just weren't paying attention or have other perception issues. I can bet you that is the kind of question I could hand to my kids and on any particular day they could grab it, look to come up with an answer in 5 seconds and move on, and in doing so might get it wrong but it is more of an impatience/not noticing thing rather than a lack of understanding if they gave themselves slightly longer to answer it.
I think we all got the 'joke' test in school where the first instruction was to read every question before commencing our answers when the last question basically said not to answer any of the questions at all when it was at least half of the smart alec kids (myself included) that raced along diligently working out every question in order before we finally got the last question and realised we'd been stupid.
Obviously we weren't stupid though, just careless in our perception and eagerness to move and I think the same kind of kid could get tripped up here (being in grayscale doesn't help either.. colour it would probably be less easy to miss what is going on).
Let's hope your kid will take after their mother, eventually.
I feel like there is two questions here one is estimation but the other is spatial.
I think if you and your kid cut the paper up and put the colours together. You will see one is bigger then the other (blue). So from a maths perspective you both probably would be able to understand that there is a higher likelihood for it to land on the biggest value and i bet you both would be right there.
The issue is spatially you and your kid aren't estimating how much bigger blue is. You are seeing 3 reds and are seeing it similar to the 2 blues and you are seeing the 2 blues and seeing it similar to the 1 yellow.
I actually can kind of understand that to be honest. If I were to ask people to compare yellow to red I bet people would have a much harder time. But see if you think about it "spatially" imagine the colours of the triangles on top of the other and see if you come to the same conclusion. If you stick the 1 blue triangle on top of the yellow for example, does it take up more then half of it, in your head?
The question is designed to judge a kids visual representation of sections and sub sections and see if they can add the colours and visualise if blue or red will be large or smaller than each other? including yellow?
I mean, it could be the same question and it could have the % next to the colours and this will test the kids addition and conclude X colour will most likely land on X colour based on their maths.
Imo nothing wrong with the question. I just think it's testing ones visual queues. Tbh I said yellow first cause I didn't read the colours.
But because it's a maths question, I would have put in the percentages of each section.
Pie charts are worst visuals, crap question.
If you take away the labelling they all look grey to me. Funny that the margin is blue though.
The spinner is most likely to land on the grey shades, especially the ones with blue written on them.
Very obvious BLUE. No need rocket science here nor Albert Einstein