Just before Thanksgiving there are competitions all over the world to celebrate cool design, tricky engineering, and to donate a whole lot of food. How many cans does it take to build this structure? What information do you need to determine this? How did you determine your solution? What else did you notice that is mathematical?
Two activities to help celebrate National Donut Day
How many donuts is that = huge box of donuts to approximate.
How have donuts changed = torus volume measurements, formula intuition, and algebraic transformation of one formula into a second formula.
Since beaches are starting to open again, we thought this activity might bring smiles and hopes. Act One: Check out this beach towel! What do you wonder? What would you like to know? Miami artist, Misael Soto (pictured on the left below),…
I have two fish in my aquarium. Betty is my white goldfish. She often stays really close to the front wall as she swims towards her food. Stripe, my clownfish, usually swims diagonally across the tank to the back top…
We’ve got hundreds of great activities that demonstrate how math happens all around us. Let your student choose an activity that interests him/her and enjoy the discoveries.
Check out our Christmas Tree. We need to buy lights for the tree. Without calculating, guess how many feet of lights you will need. What information do you need to better estimate the number of feet of lights that you…
Act One: Drill bits are measured by the diameter of the bit in inches. The drill bits below are ordered left to right in increasing size. The numerators in the fractions have been blacked out. What could the numerators be? Explain your…
Act One: Check out the video slide show. What questions do you have? The Activity: Stacking Jack Suggested Question: How many different ways can I stack Jack? That is, how many different color arrangements are there? If I wanted to take…
I have to wrap this box. In this problem based activity students first guess and then try to calculate whether they will have enough paper to wrap this present without taping pieces of wrapping paper together. …with…
Lorenzo Quinn, an Italian sculptor, created and temporarily installed this piece of art entitled “Support” in Venice. Quinn used his own children’s hands to design this piece. His intention was to demonstrate our need of human support to ensure the…
Wow! This snickers bar is huge! Act 1 – Big question = How many times bigger than a regular Snickers bar is this? What info would you like to know? How are you going to judge how much bigger this is…
Listen to students initial thoughts as they wrestle through what “bigger” means … length? height? wheel-base? volume?
I came home from work to find that my son had his cars organized in a tight parking lot on our front porch. How many cars are there? Is it an array and if so, what size array could it be…
Clicking on the image above will show the heart larger in a new window. Canstruction® is an event hosted in more than 150 countries throughout the world to demonstrate “innovation, hunger relief and collaboration”. Canstruction has raised more than 40 million…
Each year the Boston Ballet highlights the holiday season with the Nutcracker ballet. In 2014, the Boston Ritz Carlton Hotel’s chef, Andrew Yeo and his pastry team, created a gorgeous and massive Nutcracker cake of macaroons and fondant to celebrate the…