Thanks to Maggie Hefferman, Newton, MA educator, for the idea of this post.
To help you celebrate this strange new holiday, we've asked students to do a little math to help quantify what is reasonable.
The activity: Smores.pdf
Image by Twitter user @pjmdoll.
Math doesn't usually create a buzz on Twitter. This past week this post did just that. People argued online about whether the answer was 16 or 1 and proceeded to insult each other's intelligence in doing so. Use our write-up to bring your students into the discussion and see how varied their reactions and conclusions are? Enjoy! This is a current event!
We've gathered some data on movie ratings and their sequels and asked students to analyze the data, decide on some analysis and debate (with their mathematical data) which are better ... the original movies or their sequels.
Students see what they can conclude from various types of graphs and consider what size random sampling of movies and their sequels is an adequate, representative population of movies. This is a very open ended activity that will allow 6th or 7th graders to conduct data analysis at one level: measures of central tendency & variability, box plots,histograms ect. While high school students might work with greater sophistication,
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There is some beautiful land in Utah that was changed last year from federally protected land to Utah overseen land. The buttes of Bears Ears (shown above) and the surrounding territory contain over 100,000 archaeological sites and are sacred land to many American Tribes.
Ed Robinson, the Utah state director of the Bureau of Land Management, says that these changes will allow for off-road vehicles, hunting, shooting, fishing and other recreational uses.
Do you think that recreation was the point of this change? Was this sacred land needed to allow for population expansion, recreation, or what? Let your students examine the data and make their own conclusions.
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If you have a set of cubes for your classroom, this would make a great group hands-on project. Its an old puzzle but the activity deserves a revisit.
Below are two straight-on images of my stack of blocks. Can you figure out how many blocks are in my stack? The least number of blocks that I used? The most number of blocks that I used?
We recently watched the approach of Hurricane Barry and worried about the fate of Louisiana. After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, what would another powerful hurricane do to this fragile state?
What is it about Louisiana that causes so much concern? At what rate is the state loosing land and wetland? Why is this happening? Will Louisiana ever just disappear?
Check out this movie from Science Insider to learn a little more.
