This prompt is very open-ended and a large part of the goal is to “define appropriate quantities for the purpose of descriptive modeling.” Encourage students to come up with a variety of ways to represent their answers. Which ones are precise? Which ones communicate clearly? Which ones sound impressive?

Students will need to decide what information to look up and how they compare to the average data. They will also need to convert among units (ounces to gallons or gallons to cubic feet). Students who find information in metric units instead will have a much easier time with these conversions.

When describing containers, encourage students to go beyond a container they can look up the volume of and instead create a container. For example, it would be interesting for students to consider the volume of the classroom and how many times they might fill that space in a lifetime.

A good connection to the geometry content of the course is to consider how scaling up (from week to month to year) affects the dimensions of a container. Students can apply the scale factor (4 or 52) directly when considering how many water bottles or bathtubs it would fill, but students should only apply the scale factor to a single dimension of a box to accurately scale the volume.

This prompt is less open ended than Task Statement 1. If students brainstorm additional rows, then they need to decide what information to look up and how that compares to the average data. They also need to convert among units (ounces to gallons or gallons to cubic feet).

A good connection to the geometry content of the course is to consider how scaling up (from week to month to year) affects the dimensions of a container. Students apply the scale factor (4 for week to month, or 52 for week to year) directly when considering how many water bottles or bathtubs it would fill, but they should apply the scale factor to only a single dimension of a box to accurately scale the volume.