*** Two activities *** When Columbus landed in Guanahani (renamed San Salvador, Bahama Islands by Columbus), he began the European settlement of the New World. Guanahani was inhabited by the Taíno people and it wasn’t really a new world. In this…
Chucky E. Cheese needed to shred 7 billion tickets at a cost of 2.3 million dollars. Was this the real cost of shredding them?
A newly released nutritional and environmentally sustainable study shows that eating just one hot dog can take 36 minutes off your total healthy lifespan. How many would you have to eat to lose a whole year of your lifetime? How much did Joey Chestnut loose in the 10 minutes of Nathan’s annual contest?
These Aussi tomatoes (the tomato on the left of all of the tomatoes) are huge. How much do you guess one weighs? Can you figure it out?
U.S. Congress is now debating how much money to approve on spending for infrastructure. The numbers are between 1 and 3 trillion dollars. I can’t even fathom that amount of money. Is there a way to imagine it in proportion to something else?
You can appreciate why this is such a great celebration when you look at the stages and some of the events and dates of America moving towards freedom from slavery. In this activity students read about the various ways freedom…
What is a payday loan? How is it different from a bank loan or debt on a credit card? Is this a good idea?
Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest has been held each July 4th since 1972.
What do you wonder about this event?
What questions do you have from looking at all of this historical data?
How have the records changed?
Why do you think that is?
How many hot dogs can a human possibly eat in 10 minutes?
Spring is the start of tick encounters. Help students study the prevalence of Lyme disease in the US; in their own state; and methods for preventing it. What are your odds of contracting Lyme disease?
Shoprite is the largest supermarket chain in Africa. The company is presently engaged in increasing their use of solar power to harness the abundant natural resource of solar potential on the African continent. Besides saving the Earth, how big is…
Students create equations for finding the break-even points of hybrid and electric vehicles by mileage and years of ownership. They work with systems of equations to find the number of years or number of miles where the cost of these cars are the same.
Engage your students in percents as they get excited about March Madness. Is getting a higher seed really an advantage? Use 30 years of data to help determine for which seeds it makes sense to pick an upset. Finally, students determine a general strategy for picking games in the first round.
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.
For every dollar that you spend, you accumulate points. You can cash them in for savings on groceries, apply them to your gasoline purchases, or even use them to give to a food kitchen. If you are going to use them for gasoline or groceries, which way gets you the best deal?
On Saturday, January 2nd, 2021, Earth will be as close as it gets to the Sun during its orbit. Shouldn’t that make this the warmest time of the year? In this activity students become familiar with the terms perihelion and aphelion as they calculate…