Math Project: What If I Bought Apple Stock Instead?

Objective

Students use authentic data to determine how much money they'd have if they sold an original iPod compared to selling an equivalent amount of Apple stock.

Some Extras

• The original inspiration
• Apple’s homepage on 10/23/2001
• An image of the original iPod

Steps

1. Introduce the prompt: What if we bought Apple stock instead of the original iPod? How much money would we have if we sold them both today? Ask "what do we need to know?" to answer this. Students will find this information online.
2. Students compute the number of Apple shares they could have bought on October 23, 2001. Then they compute the amount of money those shares would be worth now.
3. They create three interesting ways to express the two amounts: one using a pure math skill (percents, ratio, difference) and two using equivalence (how many Big Macs, tickets to Disneyland, or PlayStations could you buy with the two values).
4. Students repeat their investigation for another product or company (or twice if you'd like!).
5. They finally create a big idea about investing vs spending, backing it up with evidence from their research. Their final product can take the form of an essay, presentation, video, website, etc.

Resources

• All of the worksheets