Which of these drinks has the strongest caffeine concentration? Can you rank them from strongest to weakest? I couldn’t. What information would you need to know to find out?

Two options here:

One, have students talk about the information they’d need and how they’d get it. (Two questions central to mathematical modeling.) Then just give them that information.

Two, have students talk about the information they’d need and how they’d get it. Give them the names of the drinks and have them research the information themselves.

I’m not too uptight about the difference. Option two has the students practicing their Google-fu. Option one costs less time.

Here are the goods. I’m pretty sure caffeine doesn’t work the way I illustrate it in the third act, so you may want to skip that clip.

I also included the cost of each drink in case you’d like to ask students to calculate the “bang per buck” ratio as a follow-up, a cool improper fraction that reads “milligrams per ounce per dollar.”