Bowman Dickson’s students discover the power rule:

This was laborious and took a ton of time in class, but by the end I felt like students really understood well the idea of a derivative. More importantly, were itching for an easier way to find it. They had all these great ideas that they were proposing, so it was easy to funnel their energy into the next phase.

Sarah (@mathequalslove) on random square root review:

Ten minutes before class was about to start, I had an epiphany. What if I made the number under the radical sign random and unpredictable?

Nico Rowinsky on the abstraction we call “a histogram”:

For the most part, as a class, we tried to organize, sort, structure, and then label our way into a graphical representation. The end product was a histogram of travel time intervals versus frequency. However, during one of my classes, I tried something a little different.

Ian Byrd writes up the best modeling task I’ve seen in months:

A practical application of multiplication is to quickly count large numbers of objects arranged in a pattern. And where do we see large numbers of objects arranged in an array? How about parking lots? As a Californian, the parking lot that stands out to me is Disneyland’s enormous “Mickey and Friends” structure.

Christopher Danielson on the Hierarchy of Hexagons:

My students proved that no Bob is equilateral. I would like to repeat that. My students proved that a Bob cannot be equilateral. I have never before been able to say that my future elementary teachers proved something. I could say before that they followed a proof I presented. Or that they produced a proof that closely mirrored one they had seen. But never that they proved something. This group did.

Kate Nowak on the Laser Pointer Shuffle:

Hey did you know underclassmen are almost as easy to entertain with laser pointers as kittens? It’s true. This challenge has had them going on and off for hours.

Nathan Kraft on Texting Algebraic Expressions:

Not bad for an English teacher who curls up into a fetal position every time I talk about math. And look! She used a variable! That saved a lot of time. And only five characters were needed! Awesome! What a convenient way to write that expression!

Mr. Owen on Graphing with Desmos:

I was surprised how quickly they were able to do it. They didn’t actually restrict the domains, but they made the general shape just fine. The best part was that they then wanted to know how to color it in. Well, “coloring it in” on Desmos means shading using inequalities. And guess what our next lesson just happened to be on. HA!! GOTCHA KIDS!!

Rachel Rosales on Correlation Station:

Today in prob/stats we started our unit on bi-variate data. Completely hijacking an idea from one of my new twitter friends, @druinok, I had the students work through a variety of stations requiring them to do different types of data collections.

Julie Reulbach on Integer Blackjack:

I got this amazing game from Denise at Let’s Play Math. It is played like Blackjack because the kids are dealt 2 cards, and can say “Hit Me!” to get up to 4 cards. They love, love, love it.

Damon Hedman on Possible Or Not:

I first saw this a few years ago at Shodor Interactivate. I think it is a good way to start thinking about functions. My favorite part is having students make up stories for each graph.

Helaina Thompson on Tennis Ball Artistry:

Cornally introduced the project as simply: “Hey! Let’s fill the room with tennis balls. I want you to need a machete to get to your seat.” The students then looked over the Colossal post and there was no stopping them.

2014 Apr 25. More correlations from Jen Campbell’s #NCTMNOLA talk. And Jared Derksen.