emergent math

Lessons, Commentary, Coaching, and all things mathematics.

Hot Rod Quadratics: Let’s jump this jump!

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Artifact

Hot Rod is one of those movies that’s incredibly dumb the first time watching it. The second time watching it, it’s still incredibly dumb, but it gets funnier with each passing viewing. It’s basically just an excuse for Andy Samberg to to Andy Samberg things for 90 minutes. I’m ok with that.

Anyway, this isn’t Rotten Tomatoes. Let’s get to our Entry Event:

The final stunt of the movie, cut ever-so-slightly short.

Suggested questions

  • The most obvious one: will Hot Rod land the jump? Or maybe better if you know how it ends: will he clear the jump?
  • You could get all physical on this question. Considering how high he is and how fast he’s going at liftoff might be some other options.

Activities

In a nod to Dan’s “Will it hit the hoop” task, I’d go with Geogebra here as well. In fact, let’s just use pretty much the same idea (side note: if anyone can rip a better quality video, I’d be interested).

hrgeogebra

In fact, I’m going to go ahead and toss it in after the Basketball task in my Algebra 1 curriculum map. I’d consider using the Hot Rod task as a way of solidifying conceptual understanding by removing some of the sliders on the Geogebra task, or removing it from Geogebra entirely and having groups do some hand-to-hand combat with it on paper. It’s times like this that a problem taxonomy could help: do you want to assess student learning or enhance prior learning?

The goods

The video (above)

A couple screen shots

Fig 1:

jump1 jump2

Figs 1 & 2 mashed together

jump12

The Geogebratube student worksheet

Aaaand the “reveal”:

On final monkey wrench:

hr_jump3

Conservation of momentum?

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