Warriors won the NBA Championships. Randall won't have to buy jerseys!
The Cleveland Brown's safety player, Damarious Randall, posted this tweet. Its been very popular and retweeted a lot. How much might he have to fork out for jerseys? Let's do some real world estimating in this fun three-act task.
When giving this activity give and complete the first page as a class before handing out page two, which has the necessary info. Let students ask you for that info before you provide it.
The NBA court has a 3-point line that separates how many points a player will earn for his team by making a basket from outside of that line. Here's a simplistic picture of 1/2 of an NBA full court. Teams are shooting more and more three's, but should they be and why?
Are all three point shots equal? Is the three point shot worth it? In this activity students read graphs, find distances using either scale or the distance formula, and work with probability and expected value. Students might also do some reasoning with arcs of circles. Please note - as students find the distance of the three point line from the rim, they should use the center of the rim.
Start your class off with this this video of some amazing 3-pointers: Great 3-pointers video
Celebrate the NBA and NBA Finals by involving your students in interpreting what can be deduced from graphical representations. In this activity students consider scatter plots, circle graphs, bar graphs, Venn Diagrams and the concept of mean. To start the activity check out the Infographic below. What do you notice? What does it make you think? What questions do you have? How does the average age of NBA champion teams compare to the league's average team age? How can we use this information to help us predict future NBA champs?
Infographic created by Paul Van Slembrouck, @ptvan at paulvanslembrouck.com Original data compiled by Idris Raja.
Continue exploring NBA championship data in our handout by exploring the dominance of a select few teams in NBA history. Students work the data, data representations and statistics. For which kind of observations are circle graphs or bar graphs most useful? Who has won the most NBA titles NBA history? Lots of math!
After chlorination, it has been hard to measure the quantity of pollutants in pool water. A Canadian chemist, Xing-Fang Li, has found a marker for urine that chlorine doesn't disguise.
In this activity, students calculate volume of several pools, change that cubic foot volume to gallons of pool water, and try to approximate how much urine is in each pool. You might kick this activity off with this silly clip from the 2010 movie Grown Ups, where Kevin James is caught peeing in the pool.
Poppies in Flanders Field
This Monday Americans will celebrate Memorial Day. Who are we honoring? How did the holiday come about? Isn't Memorial Day usually on May 30th?
Students learn a little about the history of the holiday, analyze the possibilities and patterns for when it is celebrated, and study the incredible numbers of deaths and casualties that have been caused by war. While trying to make conclusions and observations about the numbers, they can't help but appreciate the terrible cost of war and the gift that those that serve in the military have given us and our country.
Clicking on this image will show it much larger in a new window.
The Volcano Kilauea is continuing to spew molten lava and ash on the island of Hawai'i. This volcano is on the tip of the southern most Hawaiian Island. Is that significant?
In this activity students note the descending ages of the Hawaiian Islands and begin to understand the direction and rate of the Pacific plate as it moves across this hot spot in the Earth's mantle.
