Categories
Algebra Middle School

Math Review: Secret Phrase Scavenger Hunt

Another great night of learning at the Global Math Department last night, where Matt Vaudrey and Megan Hayes-Golding shared their ideas for Exam Reivew That Doesn’t Suck.  Enjoy the playback and admire Matt’s enthusiasm for teaching, and great ideas for keeping kids engaged.  And thanks to Megan for her continued willingness to facilitate and share.

One of my favorite test reivew activities is a Secret Phrase Scavenger Hunt.  The problems here are from a review of inequalities, but can be easily adapted for many grades and courses.  Full disclosure: while looking through files for this example, I was shocked to discover that this Word document is one of the oldest files in my network drive, from September 2000!  Maybe I need to edit stuff more, or maybe this activity is just plain perfect.

Here’s the idea: take a sheet of probems, and assign each problem a “secret letter”, so that problems completed in order will spell out the “secret phrase”.

Inequal sheets

Make an index card for each answer, and tape them around the room or the hallway.  I usually place the letters on the back of the cards, but for this activity they appear on the front.

Cards on board

After the sheets are handed out, teams complete problems and may get up at any time to hunt for answers.  I usually assign students to teams for this activity, and it is interesting to observe different approaches.  Some teams will complete all problems together, then hunt for all solutions.  Other teams will complete some problems, hunt for solutions, then go back to work.  Another approach is to split up the problems – “divide and conquer”.  This apporach often leads to Civil War as one or two students in a group will invariably make enough errors to bog down the process.

The winner is the first team to come to me with the “Mystery Phrase”.  To keep the ball rolling, I will often give award to the first 2 or 3 teams to find the phrase. Here are a few tips for setting up your hunt:

  • Don’t be afraid to make your phrase something goofy.  After students fill in a few letters, they may try a “Wheel of Fortune” approach.  Unpredicatable phrases avoid this some.  For my inequality sheet, I chose the phrase “TWO HAWAIIAN UKELELES” – not easy to guess.
  • Make harder problems the “key” letters in your phrase.
  • Adding a few “distractor” cards – cards that are not solutions to any problems – also works nicely.
  • If students come to me with an incorrect phrase, I do not tell them where they went wrong.  It is up to the group to re-visit their problems and troubleshoot mistakes.

Hope you and your class enjoy the phrase hunt!

Categories
Middle School

Let’s Build Some Bridges!

You’re either a genius, or the biggest idiot here.

– a colleague

Can’t I be both?

-me

It’s the first year of Keystone testing here in Pennsylvania, and everyone is adjusting to the fun changes.  And by fun, I mean time-consuming,  nightmarish organizational hoops to jump through provided by our wonderful state government.  This year, many of our 8th graders get zapped with the testing equivalent of Haley’s Comet: state grade-level testing, along with grade-level tests in writing and science….followed by the cherry on the sundae, this week’s Keystone Exam in Algebra 1.  It’s a shock they ever have time to actually, you know….learn stuff.  Hoping our kids don’t suffer too much bubbling withdrawal at the end of this week.

We have about 400 8th graders here, and many of them will take the Algebra 1 test this week.  Some, around 80, took algebra 1 as 7th graders and have already passed the Keystone.  Meanwhile, 40 or so are in a pre-algebra course and will take the Keystone next year as 9th graders.  So, what to do with 120 students, while their grade-level friends endure a state test.  For two days, and 4 hours, I have been given carte-blanhce, an emtpy slate, to keep 120 8th graders entertained.  And money!  Well, some money anyway.  What would you do?

My BridgeTomorrow morning, 120 8th graders will meet with me in the auditorium to learn their fate.  I have split the kids into 26 groups of 4 or 5 and gathered supplies for a popsicle-stick bridge-building contest.  The concept and many guidelines came from the site TryEngineering, which provides many neat and simple tasks for kids to encourage creativity and discovery.  I have worked with a colleague from our high school, who teaches an intro to engineering course, whose students found some great resources to share with the kids to get them excited about the project.  Two short and snappy videos they found from MIT feature simple bridge designs, with Lego-men being experimented upon:  Part 1 and Part 2.

SuppliesThe supplies are simple:  each group will receive 200 popsicle sticks, a glue gun, and glue sticks.  Teams will only receive the glue gun after they have drawn some sketches and discussed a plan for their design.  Most of today was spent organizing 26 boxes of sticks, and getting groups ready.  Groups will be graded on their design, how much load their bridge will hold, and how well they work together as a team.  And about those groups….all groups have a similar mix of “advanced” kids and “pre-algebra” kids, which I have assigned beforehand.  This mix led to the “genius or idiot” comment above from a colleague.  Yep, this could go badly.  But, it could go great!  Its too tempting to not try!

So, tomorrow we start building bridges.  My coach friend Gayle and I built a bridge on our own, which you see above, and we were quite proud of ourselves.  If time permits on Wednesday, we will test the strength of the bridges.  Our bridge snapped at 7000 grams.  But I am confident the kids will do a better job.

Looking forward to a fun, but chaotic, time the next 2 days!

Load Test 1

Load Test 2

Categories
Statistics

A.P. Co-Teaching: Stats Meets Psych

For seven years before becoming an instructional coach, I taught Advanced Placement statistics.  I loved this course, as every day brought a new applied situation,  a new set of data, and a new, rich classroom discussion.  While many of my math colleagues have an aversion to teaching statistics (one friend from another school said to me “you’ll become the loneliest person in your department”), I think teaching the course gives an appreciateion for how we should be approaching data analysis in ALL math courses.  But that’s a post for another day.

This week’s stats twitter chat (#statschat, 9PM on Tuesdays) started with a discussion of the recently released AP Stats items, but later moved to post-exam activities.  As part of this discussion, cross-curricular options came up, and I mentioned a co-taught lesson I have developed with my AP Psychology colleague.  For a number of years, this teacher and I had discussed co-teaching a unit on experimental design, as the AP Psych course outline actually includes a nice chunk of material AP Stats students come to understand.  One section of the description, Research Methods, is right in the AP Stats wheelhouse:

  • Describe how research design drives the reasonable conclusions that can be drawn (e.g., experiments are useful for determining cause and effect; the use of experimental controls reduces alternative explanations).
  • Identify independent, dependent, confounding, and control variables in experimental designs.
  • Distinguish between random assignment of participants to conditions in experiments and random selection of participants, primarily in correlational studies and surveys.
  • Apply basic descriptive statistical concepts, including interpreting and constructing graphs and calculating simple descriptive statistics (e.g., measures of central tendency, standard deviation).

Yey for math featured in non-math subjects!  What a natural fit for a handsome, fun math teacher and a respected social studies teacher to join forces in a class lesson!  Some students comments that it seemed so out of context to have the two of us in the same class together.  Worlds colliding!  Dogs and cats shaking hands!

For two days, we led a discussion on correlation and causation, based on a curriculum module provided by the College Board.  In the “Teaching Statistics and Research Methodology” module, the section “A Lesson on Correlation” by Amy Fineburg was used as a framework for discussion.  Students were provided with an article to read beforehand and was used to generate discussion regarding student ideas of correlation, causation and experimental design.  Our pesentation to the students is given below, and was completed over 2 days.

Ap psych stats methods revised 12 13 from bobloch
Looking forward to sharing this experience at the AP Stats reading next month, along with a similar co-taught experience developed with my school’s AP Chemistry teacher.