The Monkey Diet Problem

Monkeys in a zoo each need exactly 4000 calories a day to stay healthy.
Also to stay healthy they need to get:

From 800 to 1200 calories from fat,
From 800 to 1200 calories from protein,
From 1600 to 2400 calories from carbohydrates.

Their 3 main foods are bananas, eggs, and coconuts. Here is a table showing the cost of these foods, the calories, and the sources of the calories.

Food	Cost Each	Calories Each	Calories from Fat	Calories from Protein	Calories from Carbohydrates
Bananas	$0.15	100	10	0	90
Eggs	$0.10	100	20	80	0
Coconuts	$2.00	1000	300	200	500

Your task is to plan the daily diet for your monkeys. Furthermore, the zoo director is interested in keeping costs low, so you should check more than one diet to find out which one has the lowest cost.

This is 'problem solving' which requires a team to respond to a real world problem.
The students, in a team format, must select a strategy, examine alternative approaches and use mathematical reasoning to formulate a solution. They are also required to communicate their findings with words, diagrams, charts and tables.

This problem is suitable for 5th-8th grades.
Here are the materials you need to present this problem to your students and to evaluate their responses:

Problem
Statement

Team
Response
Sheet

Scoring
Guide

Example
Team Response

Applicable
Math Concepts

Monkey Diet
Problem

- Response
sheet

Rubric

Excellent response

- understand a table
- guess-and-check