Comments on: [3ACTS] Taco Cart

By: Algebra in 90 minutes | Biology is Life

Algebra in 90 minutes | Biology is Life — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 16:46:03 +0000

[…] Dan Meyer’sÂ three-acts on the long days. We’re doing radicals this week, so maybe the taco cart problem? I definitely need to step up my game in the algebra classes this […]

By: Jon in Maine

Jon in Maine — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:49:37 +0000

I used the taco cart problem you’ve set up here in my AP calc class. I had my students find the bearing that Ben and Dan should take to minimize the time. It was a good opportunity to work with the kids on rules of differentiation and teaching them about Wolfram Alpha. Thanks Dan! I enjoyed working getting to meet you in Limestone over the summer.

Jon

By: in which i give a talk on the profession of teaching « Learning to Fold

in which i give a talk on the profession of teaching « Learning to Fold — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 23:13:16 +0000

[…] is an example of blogging at its finest. Fawn has taken a video originally created as a 3-act by Dan Meyer, a former teacher and current grad student at Stanford. If you’ve not heard of 3-acts, give me a […]

By: Chris Robinson

Chris Robinson — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:07:43 +0000

@ Andrew Stadel

Once we established the conversion from seconds to minutes, they still needed help abstracting the relationship between 5.4 minutes and 5 minutes and X amount of seconds

My students and I went through the same process. I was floored that so many students thought 3.4 meant 3 minutes 40 seconds or 3 minutes 4 seconds. That is the beauty of this #3act, it can be used for so many different concepts in math, just not Pythagorean Theorem, rates and proportions.

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:00:30 +0000

Andrew Stadel:

They thought they were done and ready to watch Act 3. It took a little prompting, “so Chase, would you tell Dan that you’d meet him at the taco cart in 325 seconds?”

Yeah, good press there.

By: Andrew Stadel

Andrew Stadel — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 03:31:47 +0000

Dan,
Yesterday, I used Taco Cart with my 8th grade geometry students the other day. We had just finished solving my Basketball Travel lesson the previous day so they already had a feeling for the Pythagorean Theorem and rates. Basketball travel uses a constant rate so when my students saw yours, it was a bittersweet feeling for them. They thought they were just going to repeat the process, but quickly realized your rate would change as you transitioned to the sidewalk. This information was quickly abstracted. The students got straight to the solution rather quickly, but forgot to abstract the time conversion. Many groups had answers on their whiteboards in seconds. They thought they were done and ready to watch Act 3. It took a little prompting, “so Chase, would you tell Dan that you’d meet him at the taco cart in 325 seconds?” Once we established the conversion from seconds to minutes, they still needed help abstracting the relationship between 5.4 minutes and 5 minutes and X amount of seconds. I’m calling this the 3 Act lesson that keeps on giving.
*Thanks for the nod!

By: Rachel S

Rachel S — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:57:24 +0000

I love this. It isn’t entirely related to what we were doing in my algebra II/trig class but we had a little bit of extra time so I went ahead and showed it to them. Their level of engagement was impressive, especially for something tangential to the class. These problems are the stuff of revolution, and I’m on board.

By: Jeff Layman

Jeff Layman — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 05:12:42 +0000

wow, I have no idea how I missed this (basically) being mentioned in the previous post. Derp.

By: R.G.

R.G. — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 06:43:56 +0000

>RG: “I have also a nice task for your next visit to the beach: >Watching a sunset…”
>
>Sometimes you don’t need any more words (or math!)

You are right. That’s us mathematicians. Here (http://renephotography.wordpress.com/) is a sunset I took last holidays. I swear to you I did not think about math at the time. But maybe only because lake Garda is too small. Or maybe it isn’t? Need to think about this.

By: Jeff Layman

Jeff Layman — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 04:39:20 +0000

Hey Dan,

This reminds me of something one of my college professors did back in the day. He subs a dog and a tennis ball transposed over a lake in lieu of you, a taco cart and sand. Either way, it’s pretty cool stuff.

http://www.maa.org/features/elvisdog.pdf