6-8
The National Bank of Illuminations has been robbed! Students apply their knowledge of ratios, unit rates, and proportions to sort through the clues and deduce which suspect is the true culprit.
6-8
In this lesson, students determine the time it takes for a roller coaster to reach the bottom of its tallest drop. They use tables and graphs to analyze the falls of different roller coasters. Students conclude the study by creating their own roller coaster and providing an analysis of its fall.
9-12
In this lesson, students transform images through rotation, reflection, dilation, and translation using matrix multiplication. After digitizing images by representing the images as matrices, they multiply image matrices by various transformation matrices, producing transformed images.
9-12
Student groups collect height versus distance data for rolling objects of different sizes. Each group produces two sinusoidal graphs of the data, one in which both axes are measured in units, and the other in which both axes are rescaled and free of units. Students note that the amplitude and period of the unit-free graph are the same for all groups, and then discuss how their measurement opens a different way of describing points on a unit circle.
6-8
In this lesson, students look at patterns in calendars to determine the day of the week for a particular date. Students also use division to explain why those patterns occur, and then relate them to modular arithmetic. The final assessment is for students to find the day of their birth.
6-8, 9-12
In this lesson, students use proportions and similar figures to adjust
the size of the New York City Subway Map so that it is drawn to scale.
Students are asked to evaluate whether these changes are necessary
improvements.
6-8
We are lucky to live in an age where there is a lot of nutrition information available for the food we eat. The problem is that much of the data is expressed in percents and some of those percents can be misleading. This lesson is designed to enlighten students about how to calculate percent of calories from fat, carbohydrates, and protein. The calculations are made to determine if a person can follow the Zone Diet with only McDonald's food items.
6-8
In baseball, a batter's slugging average is weighted according to the number of bases he gets. To calculate the average height of a team, each height must be weighted according to how many players are that tall. This lesson introduces students to weighted averages by looking at their own grades.
6-8
Students studying linear equations inevitably explore the concept of slope. Slope is a recurring topic found in algebra when studying linear equations, in trigonometry when studying the tangent ratio, and in calculus when studying the derivative. Lead students to a deeper understanding of slope and linear equations using elevation and distance data from a popular mapping website.
9-12
Predicting the right time to take that first sip of any hot beverage is difficult. Unfortunately, the temperature of hot coffee does not decrease steadily (linearly) over time. If so, it would be easy to predict when to take that first sip. Which function best represents the rate at which coffee cools: linear, quadratic, square root, absolute value, exponential or logarithmic?
