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…
Just updated! Can you tell from its opening weekend how much the new movie, Avengers: Endgame, might earn in theaters? This activity can be used anytime and is especially timely when there is a new blockbuster movie released. We’ve left…
Year of the Earth pig Lunar New Year begins on Tuesday, February 5th. This will be the year of the Earth Pig. The year name is a combination of 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches creating a sequence of…
Sunday evening, December 2nd, is the first night of Hanukkah this year. I think it was much later in December last year. Why isn’t it always on the same date? Students look at the Hebrew calendar and appreciate the incredible…
Consumers in the U.S. spend a lot of money. In this activity we look at historical data to see if there are any patterns in our spending. How does our holiday spending show up in these graphs? What accounts for…
The official Atlantic hurricane season started on June 1 and doesn’t end until November 30th. Now Hurricane Florence is approaching North and South Carolina. Encourage your students to join the conversation, knowledgeably, by using our activity. Students read about hurricane classfications and…
In this short activity, students learn the meaning and history of Labor Day as they look for patterns emerging from the Labor Day dates over the past years. Students then use those observed patterns to predict future dates of the…
Let your students simply enjoy coloring our designs or artistically play with the whole creation of Φ designs. Simply coloring our Fibonacci patterns might allow students to ponder the Fibonacci sequence (while they learn more about its beauty) and just…
Probably most of us have heard of and even used hexadecimal color codes. Don’t you wonder why their number descriptions really make sense? In this activity we first ask students to color in our Golden Spiral by giving them the…
What’s your guess? How fast are the number of daylight hours changing each day? Will the changes be dramatic or subtle? Students make guesses; compute how long, on average, the change in daylight hours should be; play with a cool…
When the weather person talks about wind chill did you ever wonder how they calculate that number? In this activity students use the National Weather System chart to gauge wind chill, examine the patterns that correlate increasing wind and/or decreasing…
The fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie opened on Friday, May 26th. Your students might be looking forward to seeing this movie and motivated to understand the investment expenses and profit expectations. Our data and questions will help them judge this…
Passover begins this year on Friday evening, April 19th, 2019, with a Passover seder dinner. Passover is one of the three high holidays in the Jewish religion and celebrates the Exodus of Jews from slavery in Egypt. Let your students…
In order to cook Paella (a delicious Spanish rice dish) I needed to buy Saffron spice. It was hugely expensive. So, I’ve decided to start a business of growing saffron and becoming immensely wealthy.
The U.S. Open is about to get underway in New York City. It is possibly the biggest tennis tournament in the world. We’ve updated our numbers and focused on the prize money. As students ponder the amounts for various wins,…