I was only able to get a small amount of buy-in. One problem I ran into was that they figured out it was burning man, and after I told them what year it was, one student googled the answer. This was problematic, because I initially had them guess what they thought the answer was, plus a guess that is definitely too high, and definitely too low. Having them guess at the answer is how I get a lot of buy-in for these WCYDWT. But once one student shouted the answer, I noticed a definite drop in interest. If you do this lesson, I recommend not giving them the year till you give them the solution.

We didn’t come up with a solution, because there was not enough time, so I presented it as a “let’s think about this”, and then we will solve it Monday. I had about 15 minutes available at the end of class. I think 15 minutes is too much for a “let’s think about this”, and not enough time for a “let’s solve this”.

I am going to pick the lesson up again Monday morning, and try to run with Alex’s suggestion of “How much space do you think those 75,000 people (their estimate) would need to be comfortable?”. I like this because I can get them back to guessing at an unknown quantity, which is an element I lost with my google searching student.

I’m hooked. It took me a while to get hooked on this WCYDWT idea, but I officially am. Probably because it took me a while to actually administer a WCYDWT lesson somewhat correctly. Which didn’t happen until the last period of geometry on Friday. Which brings me to…

We squared a circle (circumscribed a square around a circle and used the radius of the circle to find the area of the square). Then pentagoned the circle, then hexagoned the circle, then octagoned, and so on. Eventually the kids see that a regular polygon with an infinite amount of sides is a circle, which is pretty cool because pi gets developed.

So Burning Man was awesome for us. The circle was pentagoned, and even though we didn’t go that route they still recognized the shapes and the beauty of the picture. My first geometry class found out how many people they thought were in the campsite. They didn’t even come close. My second geometry class got much closer. Then it hit me. “How much space do you think those 75,000 people (their estimate) would need to be comfortable?” “Here’s a square foot of space. How much space do you think 75,000 people would need?”

And they were off. Arguing and coming up to the board and drawing and arguing some more. Their guesses weren’t even close (I think the highest guess was 1,000,000 sq ft, when it turned out that the campsite portion of Burning Man was actually 42 mil or something like that). But they found the square footage of the campsite and loved doing it. I even videotaped one of my students, a former drug addict, saying, “I LOVE GEOMETRY!”

Further extensions to come…given the square footage allotted per person at Burning Man 2010, how many people would comfortably fit at the campsite if the “C” were extended to be inscribed inside the pentagon?