Math in the Real World

5th grade math students were treated to a guest educator today, Travis Brooks, dad to Cerritan Cedar. Travis, a product manager at Netflix and professional math enthusiast, led students through an engaging look behind the scenes at how data informs decision-making at Netflix, how data is collected, and through the scientific method with first-hand data collection to determine to answer the question, “How much data is enough?” with a penny flipping experiment. Students took full advantage of what is typically an MIT graduate student-facing lecture and rose to the occasion with curious questions, astute observations, and thoughtful conclusions. Through the whole thing, students were able to learn that larger sample sizes = more precise and accurate data and see that in many cases, data-informed decision-making be the difference of millions of dollars, as was the case for the Obama campaign of ‘08. 

Thank you, Travis, for coming to link our studies to the real world. If any other parents have professions heavily informed by math that you’d like to share, drop me a line!