Category: tasks
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The Pizza Casbah 30-inch pizza challenge
This is a picture of a single slice of pizza from my favorite pizza place in Fort Collins, Pizza Casbah. My god that looks amazing. I’m getting hungry just looking at it. This is a picture of an entire Pizza Casbah, 18-inch pizza (presumably, that means the diameter of the pizza is 18 inches): It…
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How do you slice this? ; Papa John’s heart-shaped pizza
Artifact This perplexing Valentine’s Day themed pizza shape from Papa John’s. In case you’re wondering, I was not able to find an actual size of the pizza on their website. Only this:
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A single robot-made rainbow ; what does it mean?
Artifact This amazing video of a rainbow-painting robot. (h/t: Science Friday.) Guiding Questions How much paint did this guy need of each color? What’s the radius of the rainbow? or, What’s the length of the arm that moves in a semi-circle that paints the rainbow? Which color will run out soonest? And how much sooner?…
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Pythagoras and Plants ; Aunt Bitty’s Gardens
Continuing from last week, we have another potential Pythagorean’s Theorem Project/Problem. This one was sent in by Steve. =================================== AUNT BITTY’S GARDENS Launch: My Aunt Bitty has a business creating “designer gardens”. These are beautiful little triangular gardens that fit into a particular space–usually the corner of a yard. You tell her your space, and…
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Pythagoras and Pele; Gooooooooooooaaaaaaaa… (to be continued)
…ooooaaaaalllll! There’s about a hundred different ways you could use the following artifacts to construct a lesson around Pythagorean’s Theorem. So I’ll just toss out all the artifacts and let you, esteemed teacher, take it from there. I’d love to get feedback and suggestions on how to implement these materials in the comments below. Artifacts…
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Pythagoras and the Pyrenees ; Performance Enhancing Math
This image and its ilk bothers me to no end. This is a profile of the 9th stage of the Tour de France*. (image adapted from letour.fr) So I had this simple little post in mind about the Tour de France and biking and elevation and distance and it would wrap up neatly into a…
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Is there anything cooler than a math tattoo? (A: yes, pretty much everything)
As I mentioned last time, the Pythagorean Theorem is a difficult concept to have students discover intuitively. So we’re focusing on it specifically this week. If you have any activities or ideas, please let me know. Or tweet it to me. Here’s one sent in by Kevin. ======================================== A math nerd (Let’s say her name…
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Congressional seating for SOTU and Discrete Math
Remember when in elementary school when teachers would instruct you to sit “boy-girl-boy-girl?” Well, it appears as if the United States Congress needs to be reprimanded for their childish behavior and must sit “Democrat-Republican-Democrat-Republican.” You see, Colorado Senator Mark Udall made a proposal that during the 2011 State of the Union (SOTU) speech members of…
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How big is Mega Maid’s vacuum bag; “Spaceballs”
Artifact Scene from Mel Brooks’ classic, Spaceballs. Start off by simply showing it (or any combination of the split scenes) to your students (apologies if there are advertisements, you can skip them in like 5 seconds): Now, I’m not sure if you’d want to show the entire scene in a classroom setting, both because it’s rather…
emergent math 