In this 3-act activity, students need to invent a different way to measure the powdered chocolate than what the instructions dictate. How many 1/4th teaspoonsfuls of powder = 2 teaspoons? How many 1/8th teaspoons = 2 teaspoons? General rule?
What’s your guess? How fast are the number of daylight hours changing each day? Are the changes dramatic or subtle? Students make guesses; compute how long, on average, the change in daylight hours should be; and finally understand the variability in our year of daylight hours.
Wow! Look at that score! There were some scoreboard malfunctions in this December 15, 2020, pre-season game. What might have been the final score if this game progressed at this rate? The activity: Celtics&76ers.pdf
Right now, just after sunset, in the southwest sky, you can check out the planets of Jupiter and Saturn as they get closer and closer to each other. They are millions of miles apart but they appear to be very…
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?
Students surmise what the difficulty of a jig saw puzzle entails and use rate calculations to estimate finishing times. They try to confirm whether doubling the number of pieces really increases puzzle completion time by a multiple of four.
Ooooo. Scary! This is a slightly didactic activity on vampire bats. We’ve given lots of interesting metric and customary unit facts and asked students to relate those sizes to more familiar objects. Simply enjoy the season with this slightly creepy activity…
Students learn how the Postal Service is funded and try to decide how the USPS could earn more or spend less in their operation. They finally get to think about whether the post office should be a government run service or a self-sustaining business.
In 2018, the trailer of a truck filled with Ramen noodles was stolen from a parking lot in Georgia. The trailer contents were valued at $98,000. What do you wonder about this? Is this even possible?
Could $98,000 worth of Ramen even fit in a tractor trailer?
For health concerns, professional sports now have no actual live fans. To help generate the excitement and semblance of fans, some teams use cardboard cutouts of people. Some use Zoom screens of fans. The NBA creates virtual fans. Actual viewers…
Giant hornets have now migrated to North America. In this activity students take the hornet’s measurements in millimeters and try to draw the hornet, life-sized, on centimeter graph paper. They learn a little more about the new beast.
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.
How big is a coronavirus cell? How big is a micron? How well do these masks protect against the virus? What can you observe about the size of particles mentioned? Why are we wearing masks?
Does this chart make sense to you? Is there something odd about it? How would you change it to make it more sensible?
How much could this K-pop group possibly earn on Youtube and Spotify? Unit ratio calculations. BTS