Math Playground
Activities

Counting Cars

Stand by a road, tally colours — your first real survey.

Stand somewhere safe near a road. For 10 minutes, tally cars by colour. You've just done your first survey.

Edit the data — the chart follows
12White9Black8Silver4Red5Blue2Other

Running the count

  • Pick one safe spot and a fixed time window (10 min works well).
  • Tally each passing car into its colour with five-bar gates.
  • Turn the tallies into a bar chart — the tallest bar is the most common colour.
  • Repeat at a different time of day and compare the mixes.
Your turn

Out of 40 cars, 12 were white. What fraction is that — and roughly what percent?

Where you'll meet this

Traffic surveys, footfall counts and audience measurements all start exactly like this: pick a spot, tally categories, plot the result.

surveysdata

What you'll discover

  • White, black, silver and grey dominate everywhere
  • Bright reds and blues are rarer than you'd expect
  • Different times of day give different mixes (commute vs school run)

Plot your tally as a bar chart. Compare with a friend who counted at a different street — same world, different samples.