Comments on: [WCYDWT] Speeding In Compton

By: Joel Walsh

Joel Walsh — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:46:49 +0000

That’s a ways north of Compton, in a neighborhood called Hyde Park. (the southern tip of Crenshaw) I did this with my students and loved that they made the observation that the light at Slauson and Crenshaw is the longest light EVER. Made me think that this Google Maps approach would also be great for physics teachers attempting to explain instantaneous velocity, average velocity, acceleration, etc.

By: Steve G.

Steve G. — Thu, 05 May 2011 21:34:26 +0000

Holy cow. That never crossed my mind. I think this will be a big relief to my students as well as myself. They’ve been well engaged with a number of the WCYDWT problems, but this one left all of us a little perplexed. Even with the problems (e.g. The Daily Show ones) that don’t have anything like a precise answer, they’ve been able to understand what’s going on and explain it in one way or another.

Knowing the answer now, I imagine I would approach the end stage of the process differently, with questions designed to help them “climb out of the box” and look to the sky.

Thanks, Dan!

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Thu, 05 May 2011 12:06:19 +0000

Nope, nope, don't be embarrassed. You nailed it, Steve. It's an airplane.

By: Steve G.

Steve G. — Tue, 03 May 2011 23:14:53 +0000

I’m a little embarrassed to even mention this, but my students got about 140 mph, and I couldn’t find their mistake. You’re going about 4000 feet in 20 seconds, right? That’s well over 2 miles per minute, and therefore over 120 miles per hour. My car can’t even go that fast, and I sure as heck wouldn’t try it on a residential street and through an intersection. Can someone help me out here? Is this a real trace, and we’ve made a mistake, or what?

Thanks!

By: Group 4 Technologies – Activities « The Weblog of (a) David Jones

Group 4 Technologies – Activities « The Weblog of (a) David Jones — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:17:21 +0000

[…] Was interested to see a link to Real World Math. It’s a pity that the website is having problems. Though the related blog seems operational. Ahh, this is what I wanted to see, a collection of lesson plans. This lesson around estimating distance using landmarks familiar to the students looks like having some benefits. It connects them to their real world/context and lets them see it in different ways (both through Google earth but also through mathematics). A related example is Dan Meyer’s Speeding in Compton. […]

By: Luke Hodge

Luke Hodge — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:51:44 +0000

Dan,

Stumbled across your blog recently – very interesting. Your use of the video camera is genius! Below is my first attempt at doing something similar. Took the better part of a weekend but a lot of that was picking a video editing program & learning how to use it. You seem to have a lot of motivated and interesting followers – it would be nice if we had more of this kind of thing to share amongst ourselves and spark new ideas.

Luke

By: Frank Noschese

Frank Noschese — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:55:30 +0000

Why not make it more immediate and meaningful by having the kids take video of cars in front of school? See what we did:
http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/speeding-problem/

By: David Cox

David Cox — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:29:23 +0000

I like this problem. A lot. But I'm curious as to where you draw the line with complete fabrication. I played with the idea of manipulating the times in my toaster problem to get a linear regression out of the first four settings. In fact, I made it just to see if I could, but never out it in front of my kids.

By: Peter Price

Peter Price — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:49:05 +0000

Dan,

Another great post. Thank you for inspiring teachers like Pip to teach math in a meaningful way, connected to real life experience.

This is *exactly* what I teach my preservice teacher students. It is so refreshing to find another teacher blogger who cares about the understanding of math by students, not just the doing of it.

Peter

By: tcomfort

tcomfort — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:58:33 +0000

Dan,

I love the work you do on my behalf and on behalf of my students. We are having fun with the videos. I am a disciple of what you are trying to do. I am also trying to spread the word about making math creative and divergent “again”. Keep up the cool work.