Adding Some Mystery To The Math

This week we were given an interesting take on an atypical math lesson. My peer presented a lesson themed around an Escape Room. For anyone that's unaware, these are becoming increasingly popular and are physical rooms that you and a team need to solve a puzzle to break out of the room.

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The idea of using this theme for a lesson is both interesting and attainable for me. Finding ways to captivate students can be an ongoing challenge for teachers. This is definitely an adaptation to the typical classroom environment that is sure to spike the interest of students. This would easily be considered a lesson that reaches a variety of different instructional needs for students. Furthermore, it creates an environment that is prone to be at the optimal challenges level for students (i.e., the zone of proximal development.)

This lesson drew on such a wide range of understandings, math concepts and also very importantly math processes. This creates an environment that encourages students to work as a team. From here, the students are able to each contribute their strengths to work together to solve the puzzle. This allows students of varying abilities to share their expertise and each find success in their own way.  Being able to structure a class in this way, this successfully is the representation of an excellent educator. I will strive to bring this expertise to my classroom one day.

Sinusoidal Spaghetti

When I was first learning about sinusoidal functions we were taught using a very direct teaching method. My math teacher showed us the equation, the graph and a number of key features of the function. The teacher then compared and contrasted these portrayals of the function, all the while the class (and my self) copied down the notes. The way I retained this knowledge was through reviewing my notes and slowly memorizing the function and it's properties. 

Retrieved from: https://mathbitsnotebook.com/Algebra2/TrigGraphs/phasepic5.gif 

During our course this week I was introduced to a student centred learning model for the sinusoidal function. My peer introduced this activity as sine wave spaghetti. We were given a bit of review of content the students would need to know before attempting this activity. Then we were partnered up and worked as a team to co-create the sine wave. We used a cartesian plane with a circle thats radius was 1. From here we found the sinx=opposite/hypotenuse values for a many points along the circle. We cut pieces of spaghetti to this length. Then we placed them at corresponding locations on a graph. Finally we drew out the lines to show the representations. 

This activity would have really helped me grasp the relationship of the sinusoidal function if I had been given the opportunity to do it as I learnt functions. As an educator it is important to explore various ways of representing content to students. This is a direct example of differentiating instruction and how it can benefit a number of students. 

A Hands On Approach To Maximizing Area

This past week in my teacher's education mathematics course we looked at teaching the applied stream of mathematics at the high school level. Particularly we looked at the grade 9 and 10 level.

A struggle a number of educators face is the fact that the age old saying of "practice makes perfect" really does ring true for a lot of students. In mathematics specifically it is essential for students to be given the opportunity to practice and apply their knowledge and understandings. The difficult part here is that if the students are just given practice problems over and over they will generally respond with disinterest. The key to combat this is to almost hid the math in a more engaging activity.

In our class one of my college presented an activity that did exactly this. The activity was game-based learning where students were able to demonstrate their understanding of perimeter and area. The game was involved two students playing against each other on a large grid paper. The goal of the game was to shade in more space than your opponent. Before shading an area in you had to role a set of dice.The resulting numbers on the dice dictated the dimensions of the square the play would shade. Accompanying the game board was a chart that each player recorded their moves on. The progressions of this chart helped organize the students game play while visualizing the math they were using. Once the dice were rolled both numbers were recorded; one as length and one as width, then the area was calculated and lastly the perimeter was calculated. This resulted in a chart of a variety of combinations of rectangles with lengths and wides ranging from 1-6.

The valuable part of this activity, as I alluded to, the students are engaging in an almost hidden form of math.