Based on the results from yesterday's test my students need more practice with exponents. When they arrived I put them in groups and sent them up to the boards and I fired exponent questions at them. They worked while I walked around and questioned what they were doing. There was lots of great talk in some groups. A couple of groups had a hard time focusing.
After about 20 minutes of practice, we resumed work on Pumpkin Time-Bomb. When I gave this activity I purposefully gave them the entire spreadsheet of data. I wanted them to be able sift, sort and think about what data was useful. It was a bit of a frustrating experience but clearly they need more practice making sense of large data sets. They also need way more practice with spreadsheets. I told them that they should copy the relevant data to a spreadsheet so that they could clean it up. A few students asked what a spreadsheet was. Eeeek!
They worked their way through the activity. Many students finished their analysis as the bell went, a couple stayed to finish after the bell and the rest will have to get it done on their own time.
Showing posts with label pumpkin time-bomb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pumpkin time-bomb. Show all posts
Thursday, November 9, 2017
Thursday, November 2, 2017
MPM1D1 - Day 39 Pumpkin Time Bomb
We started with this Which One Doesn't Belong:
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.
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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