Tag: lessons
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Can we make an even “edgier” brownie pan? What about the “perfect” brownie pan?
Artifact This, my friends, is part math, part food, part art, all deliciousness: It’s the all edge brownie pan, which I found from my new Favorite Website of All Time, Reasons to Go Broke. Here’s the description from the Amazon page (perfect 5-star rating): “For corner brownie fans and chewy edge lovers, it’s a dream…
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How can we measure the egregiousness of gerrymandering? Geometry, Perimeter, and Area
Artifacts This NY Times article/interview conducted by FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver and David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report. Particularly this snippet: And/or this slideshow from Slate showing the most gerrymandered congressional districts in the nation. Here’s my favorite from Illinois: It’s worth noting that by federal law, congressional districts have to be “contiguous.” That means…
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U-haul Linear Systems problem (updated and improved)
A couple weeks ago I posted this problem. I like the problem, but I wasn’t a huge fan of its solution and frankly, it sort of got away from me. Thankfully, my colleagues are more adept than I am at developing clear problems. So here’s the updated, improved version. =============================================== Moving On Up Artifact / Entry Event…
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A stop-sign vs. a stoplight; when does each make sense? (Part 2, Math modeling)
I know it’s been a while since we visited this, but quick recap: We want to figure out when it is appropriate to have a stop-sign at an intersection versus a stoplight. In Part 1, we made some assumptions about stop-sign wait time modeling and developed an equation that gave us the total wait time…
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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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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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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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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…
emergent math 