Category: 3acts

Total 60 Posts

[3ACTS] Car Caravan

If you find that first act perplexing, feel free to follow up on all three. Four other notes:

  • This one pairs nicely with the ticket roll problem. Try to imagine the tickets as really, really thin cars.
  • In the second act, I offer this picture of a single Matchbox car. There aren’t any measurements and it bears perhaps only a passing resemblance to any of the cars in the picture. I like these moments a lot, though. The student has to estimate the dimensions of the car. Her estimate is entirely her own and will likely differ from that of her classmates. Everyone will own a different answer, then, even though they’ll all be developing proficiency with the same mathematical tools. Everybody wins.
  • If you’d like to keep track of all the three-act tasks I’ve released so far, I have them logged in this spreadsheet, which is really insufficient but there it is.
  • I just uploaded my first adventure with Google SketchUp. I designed it using blueprints I received because I asked for them.

[3ACTS] Shower V. Bath

At a certain point you say to yourself, “Hell, I was never gonna run for city council anyway,” and you put on a pink shower cap and you make a math problem.

That’s the first act. The volume and concentration of responses on Twitter were promising. The entire task is available for free download at the depot. If you decide to try this out with your students, I’d love to hear about it.