I was very happy with the responses. Rather than just talking about which numbers were different in the equations, many students were talking the slope and y-intercept and how the graph of the equation would look. I think they're starting to make the connection between the different representations.
After the warm-up we moved on to Pumpkin Time-Bomb. I'm not sure what happened this year, but I was so unorganized that I didn't get any pumpkins. What kind of lame teacher does Pumpkin Time-Bomb without actually doing the activity, you ask? That would be me. We watched the video did some estimating, watched act 3 and calculated percent error. Then we fired up the Chromebooks and started looking at all the data. They were shocked about how much data there was and started asking some great questions. What school has the most? Is our school there? Why are some of the numbers weird looking? All of this without me prompting them about what they noticed. I love it.
We talked about how we should only consider rubber bands that were about the same size. I sorted the spreadsheet based on length, then on width. We talked about how some of the widths seemed to be measured in centimetres while others were in milimetres. I then told students to choose a variable (such as diameter, circumference, height, wall thickness) to compare to the number of bands required to explode the pumpkin.
Many students struggled with the messiness of the data. It took a good chunk of time for them to clean the data so that they could use it, but I think the process was a worthwhile one. That's about as far as we got today.
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