Math Links for Week Ending July 25th, 2014

I am a sucker for any resources on the nature of randomness. We really have a hard time understanding what random really is. In this interview from Science Friday, they talk to William Poundstone, author of “Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody”. In it he talks about how knowing how random truly works can be an advantage that you can exploit. This is a good topic of conversation for any students talking about probability. Listen to the full interview below.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://sciencefriday.com/segment/07/11/2014/the-surprisingly-predictable-patterns-of-random-choice.html

There are a lot of people blogging about teaching math these days and someone has been trying to catalogue the efforts. This blog is even on the list that you can find here:
Curriculum Tags: All
http://mathtwitterblogosphere.weebly.com/list-of-tweeps-and-blogs-by-category.html

At first I thought this problem might be a little trivial. But this 3Acts from Dan Meyer is actually nicely done and works well with both addition of fractions or division of fractions as well as proportional reasoning. Get the full task at the link below
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8
http://www.101qs.com/3043-nanas-lemon-water

This 3Act from When Math Happens is a nice problem that brings expectations from multiple strands in. It includes volume of cylinders and then potentially proportional reasoning and data management (depending on how far you want to take it). Plus it might get you all fired up since someone will have to drink all of those energy drinks. Since I am writing this for Ontario curriculum, keep in mind that the measurements are in inches and ounces so you may want to redo this in metric (or not). Get the full task at the link below

Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P

http://whenmathhappens.com/2014/07/16/energy-drinks/

In general, I like the idea of problem based learning but sometimes getting good problems is an issue. A good stepping stone to those types questions are what Jo Boaler calls "low floor, high ceiling" questions. That is, easy for students to start but can become more complex and deep as well. She has started to compile a list of these that you can try out on her youcubed.org site. In the coming weeks I will try to highlight some of these individually but for now take a look for yourself.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://youcubed.org/teachers/category/low-floor-high-ceiling/