“What can you do with this?” (WCYDWT) – Flood Gates Open

I’ve been making an effort to look for as much WCYDWT material as possible on a regular basis. This is not so much because I’ve had students asking ‘when are we going to use this’ though that is always brewing under the surface. Instead, I’ve been making an effort this year to spend less time in class plodding through curriculum, and more time getting students to get their hands dirty with real data, real numbers, and using their brains to actually figure things out. By recording screencasts, doing demos, and using Geogebrs, I’ve made some progress in getting the students to see the benefit of learning the routine skills-based stuff on their own for HW so we can use class time to do more interesting things. I’ve quizzed and am feeling pretty good about this thus far, but we’ll see.

During my trip with the ninth graders to Shandong and my week off due to the national holiday when my parents visited, I’ve kept my eyes open on reasonable, non-contrived problems that might serve as applications of linear functions. I’ve wanted some problems with non-trivial answers along with some low-hanging fruit that might give all of the students in the class a way in.

I’m pretty happy with how things have ended up with the top three contenders. There are some other things in the works, but I’m hoping to keep those under wraps for the moment. Click on the links to read the details.

Climbing Mount Tai

This one I already started talking about in a previous post, but I spiced it up just a bit by putting images together and throwing the head image I’ve now used in a few places to be cute.

Ms. Josie and the 180 Days

I like this one especially since it has a good story behind it. My students know my wife, and I defer to her awesomeness quite a bit in class. Students certainly love it when their teacher is willing to knock him/herself down a few pegs, especially when it’s for their entertainment and for comedic effect in class. I think this challenge is a good combination of mathematical reasoning and drama – I don’t think I can lose!

Moving on up at the Intercontinental Hotel

I was looking for a third one that really jumped out as kinda cool and visually stunning since the others, though cool, weren’t particularly impressive visually. On the last day my parents were in town, we went to the Intercontinental hotel in Hangzhou and the problem smacked me in the face.

The videos aren’t all up yet – in addition to the two outside videos, the more enlightening videos (which I will post tomorrow before class) have a view of the elevator doors and the digital floor display as the elevator moves up and down. In addition, there is a nice reflection of the view out the glass wall of the elevator, beautiful in its own right, but perhaps a wee bit distracting from the really useful stuff in this problem. If I wanted to go the full-eye-candy route, I suppose I could have gotten a reflection of the elevator doors and floor display in the glass wall of the elevator. Maybe next time.

My plan is to let students choose which of the three projects they want to work on, and then give them tomorrow’s class (and finishing up for HW) to put something together. I plan to grade according to this rubric:

I think it gives them enough detail on what I want them to do, without being overly difficult to grade. I am even thinking of giving them a chance to grade each other since they will all be posting their work (from groups) on the wiki page.

I’ve had these things in my mind for a little while – I admit, after how this particular class made an impressive effort I am really excited to see what happens next.