WCYDWT – Roll Up the Rim

For those of you in Canada, you’re probably very aware that it it’s Roll Up the Rim season at Tim Hortons.  For those of you who don’t know about Roll Up the Rim, the following YouTube video is a commercial currently running for the promotion (I apologize for the poor quality, it’s the only version we were able to find. If you know of a better version, let me know.)

Recently, I was working on a unit plan on probability with @decosser and @casseskra.  We threw together this WCYDWT, What Can You Do With This activity(inspired by Dan Meyer).

The Problem:

Ideally, you would provide each student with their own cup to go off of.  However we know this isn’t realistic and costs money (approx $1.50/student), so we cut a cup up and scanned it.

Higher quality (larger file size)

(Click images to enlarge) or All images in a .Zip file

We would hope that students would arrive at the following questions from only the information on the cup:

  • What is the probability of winning the car? (and every other prize)
  • How many cups were made for the contest?
  • How many total prizes are there to be won?
  • What does “over 47 000 000″ food prizes available mean?
  • How does the probability of winning a car change if you know someone has just won one? A coffee?

Students could also check out the Official Rules to see some exact numbers. We would expect these questions:

  • Why are our calculations not the same as the rules?
  • Should we all move to Ontario during March for the contest? (Why does Ontario get so many more prizes and cups than anywhere else? How correct are these proportions?)
  • How can Tim Hortons afford to be giving “more prizes than ever”? (How much do they make off of the coffees sold? How much do the prizes cost? etc.)

We found that this idea for a WCYDWT could easily be applied to any marketing contest (McDonald’s Monopoly for example).  This specific activity also has some cultural relevance to Canadians.

What would you do with this?

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Comments 1
  1. I am currently teaching younger kids, I may use your scanned images to teach place value. There are numbers up to the millions! ie: what number tells the number of food prizes? hmmmm the icons will help with non-readers too.

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