Math Links for Week Ending May 30th, 2014

 I really like this little intro activity for circumference from Andrew Stadel. I think any time that you can pull at students misconceptions then its a good thing. In this case its the disconnect between the size of the diameter and the size of the circumference. The vehicle is a bet about how high a glass is compared to how round. In my own class I would probably do this live and have several glasses and cylinders to have students eventually discover that the circumference is a little more than 3 times the diameter.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8
http://mr-stadel.blogspot.ca/2014/05/going-round-in-circles.html

Here is a neat idea for making tedious calculations a bit more palatable. Play the Would You Rather game. Give them a scenario and then have them choose based on two choices within that scenario. Thanks to Dan Meyer for this one.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://mrjonesmath.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/day-2-of-state-testing/






Fawn Nguyen has done a great job of summarizing the data from the McDonalds Monopoly game. She includes the spreadsheet for analysis all the prizes. For the younger grades (7&8) you can just concentrate on the odds and some anecdotal stuff but for grade 12 students you can extend to expected value. One of the things that I like that she did was tried to compare the prize purse for Canada and the US and found that indeed they are somewhat proportional.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fawnnguyen.com/2014/05/04/mcdonalds-monopoly-game.aspx

Now some may poo poo having kids use stickers to indicate how they are doing but when ever you can get kids to self assess then you are actually helping them move forward cognitively. So having kids indicate how they thought they did on an assessment is a step in that direction. We have had success in doing this with learning goals but here Check out how Julie has done that in her class here.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://ispeakmath.org/2014/05/21/stickers-for-self-assessment/




And one more from Julie at I Speak Math. In grade 8 we have to teach Pythagorean theorem but in a way that students are to discover the geometric property. If you have snap cubes then that is an easy way to do this.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8
http://ispeakmath.org/2014/05/15/discovering-the-pythagorean-theorem-with-cm-cubes/





I really like sorting activities. And this one is from the Shell Centre was pointed out by Mary at the M^3 blog. It's about sorting different representations of simple polynomial functions (including factored and non factored forms). She spread out the images and text over two posts and I like how she showed some student work that had mistakes in it. You can get the templates of the handouts here.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM2P
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2014/05/day-68.html
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2014/05/day-69.html



For the stat heads out there (and those who love baseball), Wolfram Alpha has now entered piles of baseball stats into their database. Check them out here
Curriculum Tags: MBF3C, MDM4U
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/05/05/going-going-gone-and-into-wolframalphas-baseball-data-collection/

I don't agree but it is still funny. Thanks to Timon Piccini for this one
Curriculum Tags: All