Mathematics in Cocoa

YULFIANA and 13 other friends claimed to have really enjoyed mathematics lesson they had just taken part in. "We learnt mathematics but it felt like working in the garden helping our parents," said the class IX students of SMPN 5 Marioriwawo, Soppeng district.

If they like this kind of teaching, it is because their parents are all cocoa farmers. Their school is in the middle of a cocoa plantation. Every day to get to their school which is quite isolated, they have to walk up and down the mountain through the cocoa trees. The school cannot be reached by car, even on a motorcycle they sometimes have to get off and push it, because the road conditions are rocky. If the motorcycle slipped you could fall down a steep cliff and into the river at the bottom of a deep ravine.

But, incredibly, the school is implementing contextual learning! Syafruddin, S. Pd, a Mathematics teacher and the driving force behind the DBE3 active learning style, presented the basic competency: Determine and interpret the mean (average), median and mode of a single set of data. He did this using cocoa pods. He chose cocoa as a source of learning to associate the function of mathematics with students' lives, particularly in calculating the productivity of cocoa plantations.

He believes that teaching the Mean, Median and Mode, by simply giving students ready-made data does not stimulate students' creativity to find and sort the data, let alone interpret the data. If this is the case, students would not be able to use mathematical knowledge in everyday life. He managed the two forty minute teaching periods effectively using ICARE. During the core activities lasting 60 minutes Syafruddin facilitated the students working in groups to gather and sort the data, discuss it and present their work on how they were able to determine the Mean, Median, and Mode.



The students were able to interpret the data found. The steps in data collection included:

(1) The students divided into four groups, one each for the Mean, Median, Mode, and Quartiles.

(2) Cocoa pods were distributed to each group in different amounts. The Mean group was given 13 pods, Median 12 pods, mode 15 pods and Quartiles 14 pods.

(3) The students then opened each fruit to count the cocoa beans in it. In this step, he reminded students that the number of seeds from each fruit was a Single Piece of Data.

(4) The students added up all the seeds in all the cocoa pod. Here he reminded his students that the total number of beans from all the pods divided by the number of cocoa pods produces the Mean.

(5) The students sorted the individual data from each pod from the smallest to the largest. He then explained to the students that the middle number (value) is called the Median. He reminded that if the number of individual data obtained is odd then the median is a middle number (value). However, if the number of individual data obtained is even, then the middle two numbers (values) are added together and the result divided by two. The result is the median.

(6) The students determined a single data (number of cocoa beans in a pod), which appears most or has the greatest frequency. He reminded that that is the Mode.

After completing the discussion session, the group answered questions on their worksheets, made presentations of the work and reviewed other groups' work. Syafruddin asked the students to draw conclusions as part of their reflections on the meaning derived from the data they found. The Median group represented by Yulifiani said, "We discovered that in our village Maccope the average cocoa pod as many as 45 beans. The least number of beans in a pod is 15 and the greatest number was 59. "Yulifiani seemed very pleased to learn mathematics," I love Mathematics! Learning like this it feels like eating delicious chocolate from our cocoa beans," she said.