This activity is a investigation intended to get students and teachers to loosen up a little and appreciate how just considering a situation might lead you to a very reasonable approximation.
Too often students think that there is only one answer that is right and that the method for approaching that solution is also limited to the “correct” approach. Surely this fear of experimenting and guessing leads to math anxieties and the fear to reason and experiment.
Finding 4-leaf clovers! Shamrocks in Ireland are actually be 3-leafed white clover, trifolium repens. If you are lucky, you can sometimes find a four-leafed clover. How rare is finding a 4-leafed clover? How hard do you have to look? What…
We’re still learning about the coronavirus and its ability to and tendencies toward infection and spread. Students learn about the R-naught number which is a measure of infectious growth. Real-world mathematics!
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…
In this 3-act activity, students look for a pattern to count these cans. Canstruction is an annual event that takes place just before Thanksgiving in cities throughout the world to raise money and gather food for local food banks.
Strange happenings when one neighborhood observes daylight saving time and one neighborhood doesn’t. Do you get confused? Does UTC notation help?
Students consider how to determine the best candy haul prediction. The math ideas of measurement error and percent error are introduced. Students then predict their own Halloween candy collections numbers and compare their predictions to their actual haul using measurement and percent error.
Fall is a beautiful time of year for hiking. Many students will be walking in the woods and mountains to enjoy the colorful leaves and the cool weather outside. Let them combine what they are doing with their families and…
We are nearing the finale of this year’s March Madness tournament. Which NCAA teams must have the best basketball programs since they consistently do well in this tournament? Based on this data, which do you think is the greatest March…
Locked in a smelly bathroom for one hour and then promised a lifetime of Whopper meals, an Oregon man sued BK when the manager’s promise was withdrawn. How much money should he ask for in his suit? The activity: BurgerKingBathroomLawsuit.pdf
On January 1st, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft passed close to Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object that’s a billion miles beyond Pluto. That milestone marked the most distant celestial object that we have ever been able to see close-up. In this activity student do some rate conversions to try to understand the delay in knowing that the mission was a success.
You have probably heard about major storms hitting Hawaii and the Carolinas. Now is the season for increased cyclonic activity around the globe. How is it measured? Are storms becoming more intense? Did you know there is a formula for…
Nike has just chosen a surprising person to represent the 30th anniversary of their slogan, “Just Do It”. Colin Kaepernick, past quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, has been a subject of controversy since 2016 when he “took a knee”…
Can you imagine being stuck in the dark for such a long time? How do all of the numbers play out? In this activity, students get a chance to talk about the experience of this ordeal while calculating usual rates…
