Year: 2013

Classroom Resources from the AP Stats Reading

Post author By Bob Lochel
Post date June 27, 2013
2 Comments on Classroom Resources from the AP Stats Reading

Last week, I returned from 7 days in Kansas City where 650 of my closest friends and I successfully completed the “Million Question Challenge”. This year, over 170,000 students took part in the AP Stats exam. With each exam having 6 questions, this was the first year the readers had the million-question task.

In the evenings, there are lots of great learning and networking opportunities for teachers. One of the highlights is “Best Practices” night, where this year 17 teachers shared their classroom action. I presented my ideas and experiences with co-teaching in AP courses beyond stats (which I have featured on the blog before): what a fun and intimidating experience to present in front of so many people whose work I admire! My slides, below, outline my experiences working with teachers an AP Psych and Chemistry, and some examples problems from Biology.

You can check out presentations and support materials for many of the Best Practice speakers at Jason Molesky’s Statsmonkey site. Some of my favorites, things I am definitely looking forward to trying or exploring, include:

Kevin DiVizia’s “Scatterbrained Fathom”: to collect data to later use as an opening to the meaning of r-squared in scatterplots, Kevin takes his classes down to his football stadium’s turf field, “the world’s biggest ruler”, and has students launch stomp rockets. A very cool data collection idea. Does vertical height or participant weight make a difference ? If the reaction of the room is any indication, the Stomp Rocket people will have many new customers this coming year!

Robin Lock – StatsKey. This free online site has pre-loaded data you can use to explore topics from the AP Stats curriculum. I enjoy the sampling distributions area, where samples can be drawn repeatedly from a large population and their means analyzed. Check out this sampling distribution of samples of size 30 from 2011 movie budgets, a population which is skewed right.

StatsKey

Luke Wilcox’s “Understanding and Visualizing Significance Level”. Do your students REALLY understand what they are saying when the write hypothesis test conclusions? Stop using flippant phrases like “If the P is low, reject the Ho”. and insist that your students write out specific language from day 1.

Check out the many great ideas on the Statsmonkey page. Thanks to Adam Shrager and Jason for organizing the evening. Looking forward to next year already!

Tags ap reading, best practices

Technology

Conics Webcast

Thursday evening at 8PM EST, June 20, I am looking forward to sharing my Desmos conics project in a webcast.

Go to Desmos’ place on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/desmosinc where you will be able to view the webinar and answer questions. This webinar was rescheduled after some snafus with Google Hangout, which we hope (fingers crossed) will be all ready to go tomorrow. Scroll down to my last post for more info. Have your computer ready to watch, and maybe your iPad handy, as we will walk through a sample drawing.

Hope to see you there. What should I wear when broadcasting from my dining room? Suggestions encouraged.

Tags conic sections, desmos

Algebra Technology

More Great Conics Project News!

Post author By Bob Lochel
Post date May 30, 2013
3 Comments on More Great Conics Project News!

UPDATE – a newer post concerning this project, with rubric can be found with this post.

I can tell it’s the end of the school year, and math teachers are looking for fun math projects to do with their classes, as the search terms which get people to my blog contain lots of references to “conics projects, “math art projects” and the like. The searches have led to many hits to my conic sections art project blog post from last June.

At my home high school, this is the second year we have done our long-standing conic sections art project using the Desmos calculaor, and this year’s submissions have raised the bar considerably. The most improvement has come from working with students to restirct domains, which has made more complex drawings easier to manage. Here are a few to share, but look for an announcement from Desmos, with whom I will present a webinar on June 6 and give you some ideas for getting started with your class.

First off, a tiger, which took over 100 individual equations to create. Stunning!

Tiger

Next up, an ambitious student who took 87 different picture “slides” to create this animated gif. I wish I was half this creative when I was 15!

Falling Man

Check out the recording from the Global Math Department for more information, and be on the lookout for webinar information on the 6th! Meanwhile, let me check some of our other Algebra 2 classes for some promising projects!