Being a puppy, she's been sucking up most of my time. The rest of my time was, and is, filled with: reading journal articles, working on Jo Boaler's rich How To Learn Math course, creating some project based plans for a new course I am teaching next semester, furnishing the new apartment that my wife and I have moved to...etc.
That's enough for excuses. I thought I'd organize my time a little better and post about what I did in the last semester.
I am going through some of the pictures in my phone, and making some brief descriptions of what I did... Hopefully it will be coherent.
There are these water fountains that have been installed in every school in our school board. There are two at our school.
We began by asking if they've seen the water fountains before. Then I ask them if they saw numbers on the top right corner of the water fountain. Some of them said yes, and proceeded to share what they thought it said. Here's an example of what that looks like:
Two students then receive the top secret mission of obtaining these numbers from the fountains.
This is where we talk about being green, saving the environment, and how mathematics can help us do this (beyond just recording).
Once the two students return with the numbers, I announce that we will be retrieving these numbers over the next few weeks.
As you can tell, we also built other estimations that was related to tweets (students chose who we were "following"). Every day after this I get them to estimate what the numbers are for that day. I get them to guess numbers that were close. At the same time, I would send students to retrieve the numbers while the rest of them estimate, justify, and defend their choices.
The water bottle count, in particular, lead to some nice real life data. The gaps caused by the weekends gave opportunities for the students to think about how to deal with data and how to use data. Interpolation fit nicely into that discussion. They come up with the ideas/concepts. I help them build the details and supply them with terminology as necessary.
Besides using this for data management and opportunities to talk about linear and non-linear relations, I also noticed the difference between the two water fountains. One was used a lot more than the other. We discussed the reasons for this, and then I showed them this video that I made.
It was fun. Including data collection, this took about 2 weeks - and it was well worth it. I think I have some data and graphs somewhere... maybe I will find it later. Although based on my last post, I would strongly encourage you to find something similar in your school! What can you track and record daily? What kind of relationship would it be?
e-mail me or leave me a comment if you think of something cool!
I had a similar idea when the fountains were installed at my school. Glad to see that it worked well for you. It would be neat to track the consumption with some other factor like daily temperature.
ReplyDeleteMatt