What is Artemis 1 and when will it launch?

Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

50 years ago we landed on the moon. We've established a space station and flown astronauts and guests to live there. Private industries have created reusable space delivery systems.  What's next?

This week, what's next (Artemis 1) was set to launch.  It is a new lift-off rocket (SLS - Space Launch System rocket) and a new crew and cargo module (Orion) into orbit. Artemis 1 will travel thousands of miles further from the Earth than has ever been flown before.

In this activity, students try to decipher several graphics that explain the flight path of the Artemis mission and make comparisons about what has been accomplished before.

The activity: Artemis1.pdf

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Labor Day 2022

What is this holiday about?  Are we celebrating the start of school?  New cars? The end of summer?

In this short activity, students learn about the intended meaning of Labor Day as they read about its origin. For the mathematical part, they look for patterns in the history of Labor Day dates. Students then use those observed patterns to predict future dates of the holiday.

The activity: LaborDay2022.pdf

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Someone ate my cake

StrawberryCake

In this fraction operation and representation activity, students are asked to decide how much of my cake was eaten. Using fraction multiplication (or angle measure if that is where you need an activity) they find out how much someone owes me for what they ate. The task could also solve using ratio and proportion reasoning.
The activity: Someone-ate-my-cake.pdf

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Will sending you back to school this year cost a fortune?

With high inflation rates, supply shortages, and rethinking what is essential spending, back to school spending might be different this year. Back-to-school spending is huge and students might not appreciate what it costs to send them back to, essentially, their job of learning.  In this activity students decide what equipment and supplies are necessary, estimate how much that will all cost, confer with classmates to refine their lists, and then research to find out more accurately how much it will probably cost to send them back to school.  This activity could be used for students in upper elementary school all the way to high school.  It offers an opportunity for kids to estimate, research, reason, calculate and communicate with each other. 

The activity: BackToSchoolCosts-2022.pdf

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But it didn’t sell?

A&W offered a bigger, tastier burger but it didn't succeed in grabbing customers away from the hugely popular McDonald's quarter pounder. The A&W third pounder hamburger cost the same as McDonald's quarter pound burger but customers still didn't bite. Studies found that Americans thought that one-third of a pound contained less meat than a quarter of a pound. Wow!

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Hexadecimal coloring

Clicking on this image will show you a larger light coloring Venn diagram.

Probably most of us have heard of and even used hexadecimal color codes. Don't you wonder why their number descriptions really make sense?

In this activity we first ask students to color in our Golden Spiral by giving them the hexadecimal codes of the colors that we want them to use.  Then we help them begin to understand which number weights between 00 and FF have the strongest values and how they blend.

All of our digital devices use light blending to create colors.  Why not begin to understand how that works.  Enjoy!

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