Comments on: [Makeover] Bedroom Carpet

By: Success » My first #MakeoverMonday

Success » My first #MakeoverMonday — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 22:11:40 +0000

[…] is my first attempt at a #MakeoverMonday problem that Dan Meyer has been leading. However, I want to put my own spin on it and try to use the concepts from Stephen Brown & […]

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 16:43:22 +0000

Sue Hellman:

I think this might be an exercise in giving students practise in sorting through the information to reconstruct the problem for themselves into manageable chunks. They might not even have to solve it, just find and deal with all the red herrings.

I'm not convinced that practice has a lot of application outside of math textbooks and math tests. In life, we tend to start with a goal state (eg. the room gets fully carpeted) and then we work towards that state by deciding what information is relevant. It's unusual to start with the goal state and a pile of information someone has given you, some of which may be relevant, some of which may not be. Patti and Scott are onto something useful here. What do you do when students realize other people will do the math for you? One option is to make those people incompetent or liars. "Right. The carpet guys came by and said they'll do it for ten thousand dollars. They insist it won't cost any less than that. Can you prove they're liars?"

By: Sarah Miller

Sarah Miller — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 16:03:14 +0000

I really like Dan’s addition of watching ‘how to lay carpet’ videos. I know something like that would do a lot for my kids and would be worth the time. It builds on my relationship with the class when we can talk about non-math stuff, even something “boring” like laying carpet. (well, non-math to them, anyway). Plus, I like the message of “You could take on a big project like this if you wanted to. There are free resources (YouTube) to help you figure out how to do it. And you can figure it out”

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 04:23:09 +0000

Don’t the guys from Lowes…..

I know of two math teachers and a very astute science teacher (Jeff) who caught mistakes by these people who *will do* the math for you…

Even the sneaky kids (sorry, maybe I know my kids better than you) perk up when it comes to money….

I want to call 3 contractors to do something myself tomorrow, now…

:).

By: Roger Gemberling

Roger Gemberling — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 04:21:50 +0000

Carpet is sold in a variety of widths. Twelve feet is the most common width. Fifteen feet is next most popular width. Finally 13 feet 6 inches in the third most common width sold.

A carpet company in Georgia (Georgia Carpet Industries) has a variety of widths available. They are 6 feet, 8 feet, 12 feet, 13 feet 2 inches, 13 feet 6 inches, 15 feet, and 15 feet 4 inches.

My students have completed a similar problem. I would provide carpet with widths of 12 feet and 15 feet.

By: Patti

Patti — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:23:31 +0000

As I am currently in the process of getting new carpet for a house that desperately needs it, I’ll tell you what some of my students answered when I posed a similar problem to them using my own downstairs:

“Don’t the Lowe’s* guys take care of all the math for you?”

And, they’d be right. The Lowe’s guys WILL take care of all the math for you. Of course, that takes the fun out of it.

You’ve inspired me to try to get pictures or video of my house once we get the furniture moved. We have tons of stuff, so there may be a lot of shifting while the installers are here. If I get anything usable, I’ll share it. I’m guessing it will be too much of a mad scramble for me to do a decent job, but we’ll see.

*Lowe’s is a large home improvement chain, for those who don’t have them.

By: suehellman

suehellman — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 21:06:39 +0000

(1) Re vocabulary: ‘bolt’ can easily be switched to ‘roll’ but ‘nap’ is important so the carpet layer doesn’t rotate left over pieces to fit them in. Bringing a couple of samples in would make this point. Pattern match is part if the reason for adding 10%.
(2) Re units: Canadian trades people have to be able to transpose between metric and imperial. There’s some realism to someone measuring their room in metres and then finding to their surprise that carpet is sold by the sq. yd. Lesson to learn? Go home and measure again or know that a meter is 3″ longer than a yd.
(3) Re complexity: To me those are authentic complications of unravelling the problem, but has anyone mentioned that the sketch badly misrepresents the room’s proportions?

I think this might be an exercise in giving students practise in sorting through the information to reconstruct the problem for themselves into manageable chunks. They might not even have to solve it, just find and deal with all the red herrings.

By: l hodge

l hodge — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 20:23:02 +0000

The most intriguing part of this to me is that you will have to buy more carpet than the area of the room (because carpet only comes in 12 foot width). How much more? Somewhere I read that the rule of thumb is to buy 10% more than the area of room. This is my attempt. Minimizing the number of cuts might be interesting for larger rooms that would require several sections of carpet.

By: Andrew Busch

Andrew Busch — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 19:45:06 +0000

I like the idea of taking a video of a room needing new carpeting and asking the students what it would cost. This allows students to pick out the important details needed to solve the problem.

I’d probably already have the carpeting picked out. That decision can take weeks for people actually going through the process. So, with an eye to the clock, that’s a decision I would make for them. When they ask how much the carpeting costs, I would show them a picture and say the homeowner decided on this, which is $_.__ per square foot.

We could add an extra step of complexity by comparing modular carpeting sold by the square (19.7″ by 19.7″) rather than the roll.

I think students will be surprised at how much carpeting a room can cost (close tiling it with dollar bills).

Getting this done in one 45 minute class period–priceless.

By: suehellman

suehellman — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 19:37:01 +0000

My suggestion: In Canada many trades people receive contractors’ deep discounts on materials. I might find a local carpet layer and ask for job bids on say 3 types of carpet, and then ask the students to work out the DIY costs (after a trip to the local carpet warehouse store where they can compare types of carpet). The problem could be to decide if the DIY route is worthwhile, and that could lead to conversations about other ‘costs’ that might be factored into the DIY price or about how trades people figure out job bids.