Author: Geoff
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A stop-sign vs. a stoplight ; when does each make sense? (Part 1, Math Modeling)
Artifact Can we use math modeling and/or equations to answer the question of when it becomes advantageous to install a stoplight vs. a stop-sign? Can we “ambush” students by having them create equations without really knowing it? What are some of the things we need to know about this? Guiding Questions How long does a…
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Can you predict how many followers @charliesheen has right now? ; Exponential growth? (Part 2)
Be sure to check out Part 1 of this post, when the activity was assigned (i.e. if you were absent from E/M yesterday). There I provided my data on the number of Charlie Sheen’s twitter followers and the time. I hypothesized that it would be a more-or-less exponential growth curve. I’ll break this up into a few…
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Can you predict how many followers @charliesheen has right now? ; Exponential growth? (Part 1)
Sometime on March 1, 2011, Charlie Sheen joined twitter at the suggestion of Piers Morgan, who is apparently some type of person. By the time I was alerted of the existence of a @charliesheen twitter feed, it was 4:04 PM Mountain Standard Time. Sheen had yet to tweet, but already had somehow amassed over 100,000 followers. He…
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Is there anything wrong with this graph? ; Looking for a good economist
I’m trying extremely hard to stay out of the comentariat concerning education. My love is instruction, not politics. Students, not funding. Engagement, not class sizes. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at this graph presented by Bill Gates. Now, I’m not an economist, so can one of you out there that is…
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A 90-yard punt ; Quadratics
So upon my call last week for quadratic activities, I got a ton of resources in my inbox. I’ll post them soon after I’ve had a chance to look through them. Until then, here’s something I cooked up that could go several different directions, depending on your students’ needs. Artifact This terribly grainy video of…
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Can someone help me with my 5-year-old daughter’s Math homework? (Part 2)
So remember the first part of my quandary about my kid’s math homework from this morning? Well, now I’m on the next question and I’m stuck again. I’m not sure what “do we see” means. Does it mean how many hats of the 17 do they both see? That could mean this. Then again, “hats…
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Brainstorming Quadratics
I’d like to do for Quadratics what we did with Pythagorean’s Theorem. I put out the call on Pythagorean’s Theorem and had come up with several ideas, only a couple of which were by me. So I’m putting up the bat signal again. Except in this case it’s the quadratic formula signal and asking for…
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Can someone help me with my 5-year-old daughter’s Math homework?
I’m being serious. It’s due tomorrow and I have no idea how to answer the following question. Now, the answer to this is obviously “four.” The narrator has four cats. The number of cats his or her friend has is irrelevant to the question. I’m just not sure how to fill in the pictures and symbols. Here’s…
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Please give your students this quiz, and how big is a “bushel” anyway?
(h/t: Freakonomics blog) The following is an actual test given to 8th grade students in Kansas in 1895, unearthed by the Salina Journal. Please refer to the “arithmetic” section. Here are the “arithmetic” questions and my attempted responses: 1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic. Umm….. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally? 2.…
emergent math 