Hi Julie,

We have two responses for you. We are both university professors in mathematics and we are not experts on the curriculum in elementary school so we may be off base.

Here is one possibility. The input is the names of the students in your class and the outputs are the number of siblings they have or maybe the number of pets they have. This is an example that migh fit into the data collection strand of the curriculum.

Harley

Perhaps you wants what the math textbook I remember from Grade 3 used to call a "function machine", depicted as a Rube Goldberg-inspired cartoon box into which you put 1,2,3,... (on a conveyor belt IIRC) and got out perhaps 2,4,6,... or 5,6,7,.... Then you had to say what the machine would do if you put in 10, or what you had to put in to get 8. In later grades we stuck them together in chains.

RD