Students will rank fast food restaurants from best to worst based on their nutrition, price, and distance to sport field. Students will need to be able to add, subtract, and multiply decimal numbers. Given the first data set, students will come up with a procedure for ranking restaurants based on the prices and nutrition information given. Students will need to consider what is more important, price or nutrition. They will also need to determine what nutritional elements are more important to consider (fat, calories, sodium). Because some ties can occur, students will have to make tradeoffs for nutrition or price. Given the second data set, students have to reconsider their procedure when given price and coupon information along with distance to the restaurant and budget.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.