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Category: what can you do with this?

Total 99 Posts

What Can You Do With This: EXIF

By • November 23, 2008 • 17 Comments

For the last month, I have had this single image banging around in my head, hogging valuable CPU cycles. I couldn’t find it anywhere else so I shot it myself. Click the photo for high quality. See the pilot for instructions.

BTW: The comments feature no fewer than two dozen lesson inspirations, at which point the questions become (I think) which lesson inspiration a) will sustain the most interesting math the longest? and b) which prompt can be summarized the most succinctly, the most viscerally? I think those are two of the most important metrics for evaluating these ideas.

Under that light, you have Ben Wildeboer: “Calculate time before impact with the ground.” It’s visceral. The student wonders first how she’ll find that information in a static image. It seems impossible. The result is a page of physics function work.

Also: “How high was the ball when it was dropped?”

Or: “How long has it been in the air?”

My work for both of those questions:

The first answer is off by nearly a meter. That’s just under 100% error.

BTW: A reader writes to let me know I blew the math here.

It seems that the work shown is using different reference points. At the top of the diagram the top part of the ball is used, and at the bottom of the diagram, the bottom part of the ball is used. I think the top of ball should be used for both or the bottom of ball; either of which would require knowing the diameter of the ball.

He’s absolutely right, which would explain the 100% error.

What Can You Do With This: Schrute Bucks

By • October 21, 2008 • 35 Comments

Download high quality here. See the pilot for instructions.

[I set off a hydrogen bomb on my blog with that last WCYDWT (since redacted, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t sweat it). Everything from a lousy audio transcode to Vimeo shutting down my account for violating its TOS. Sorry for the confusion.]

BTW: Let’s give it to Dan:

I thought it really demonstrated a more common error of classroom management: rewards are determined by the receiver, not the giver. Some punishments will be rewards to certain students and vice versa.

What Can You Do With This: The Bone Collector

By • October 8, 2008 • 39 Comments

Download high quality here. See the pilot for instructions.

The math here is fairly self-evident (I think) but I’m really curious how you’d deploy this in the classroom. Be specific.

BTW: Mr. Follett โ€“ concise and correct:

(1) Play clip.
(2) Pass out the photograph, Iโ€™d get this by doing a screen grab.
(3) Make other materials available: dollar bills, rulers
(4) Make this info available.
(5) Ask them the shoe size.
(6) Discuss, reflect, justify.

This is, more or less, exactly how it went in Algebra for us this week. Here is the relevant frame grab formatted as a 4×6 frame as well as the follow-up scene from the movie itself.

BTW: The application RulerPhone ties into this nicely. More here.

BTW: A much better hook from an audience member at my UC Berkeley presentation than the one I originally concocted: “Which of your classmates could be the killer?”

Out Of Control

By • October 6, 2008 • 16 Comments

You people. That’s what you are.

Maybe this series has stronger legs than I originally though, particularly with ELA guys like Tom, Christian, and Todd dropping by to push what I figured to be a math-only prompt through their own content-area strainer.

There are too many awesome bits to summarize, frankly, but from just two pictures you people posted lesson plans for combinatorics, population growth models, graphic design, racial profiling, optical character recognition, regression, the Freedom of Information Act, and that’s just what’s fit to print. Some of the other suggestions were downright hope-your-administrator-doesn’t-stop-by-that-day crazy.

So we’ll try this again. Two things I’m kicking around in the interim:

What Kind Of Model Is This?

Mike:

This conversation is on the verge of a Lesson Study. With some focused organization and implementation, this could turn into a model for the future of teaching and learning about student learning.

Maybe.

How Do Textbooks Manage To Blow This?

Briefly:

  1. Using clip-art (if that) where photography is the prescription.
  2. Establishing a too-narrow framework for how students (and teachers) experience media. The hypothetical is this: if I had put those photos up with an explicit question (ie. “how long until Costa Rica runs out of license plate numbers?”) would any of that other zany fun have occurred to you? Would it have occurred to your students? Far better to project a full-color, unmodified, uninflected image on the board with a) a clear idea where you want it to go and b) the courage and humility to let it go somewhere elseI swear I don’t even sound like myself sometimes..

Textbooks suck at this. They’re perfect for below-average teachers with limited imagination and limited love for their own content areas, the sort that need a pick axe, a shovel, and a map to the goldmine handed to them before it’ll occur to them to start digging.

It’s kind of an indictment that this has been such a profitable business model for so long.

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