Your regular commute begins at your house and ends at your office at the corner of 5th street and 6th avenue. You have been making this trip for years, but you are the restless (or adventurous) type, and you try to take a different route each day. At some point, you start to wonder how long it will take you to try all of the routes.
Oh, did I mention that you have to avoid the zombies?
Students will explore a game between two players moving a chess Queen from place to place on a square grid. The Queen may move any number of spaces to the left, any number of spaces downward, and any number of spaces on the downward-left pointing diagonal. Each player takes turns using these moves. Whoever gets the Queen to the bottom-left square first wins!
Developed as part of the Math Circles of Inquiry project, this session is a good introduction to the 8th grade or Algebra Math curriculum using inquiry based instruction. Students are asked to use their problem solving skills in order to determine the relationship between the number of Supreme Court justices and handshakes that occur when each pair shakes hands exactly once. Students will begin exploring with simpler numbers and work up to creating an algebraic expression to represent the function. This lesson allows for multiple representations by using a table, list, circle diagram, matrix and manipulatives.
Developed as part of the Math Circles of Inquiry project, this session is an introduction to functions. This module allows students to investigate the definition of a function, function notation, key features of a function including increasing, decreasing (in both interval and inequality notation), maximum and minimum, average rate of change and domain and range.
Materials include a full packet of worksheets pertaining to this unit (54 pages). This part of the unit (not including transforming functions) should take about six hours of class time.
In this session, developed as part of the Math Circles of Inquiry project, you are playing Fortnite. There are three loot boxes marked by your teammates. Which one is the best to go to? In other words, which point is closest to a given point outside a circle, the center of the circle or one of two points of tangency connecting the outside point to the circle? The highly contextualized nature of the problem posed will make the mathematics more appealing for students to explore. Moving between individual work, partner work, and whole class discussion, students make their predictions and...
A town has recently been plagued by an epidemic of zombies! Luckily, the virus has just started to spread and the infected are able to stave off their hunger for human brains… for now. In fact, they’re willing to work alongside the remaining humans to help them get across a river to safety. Can you get all the humans and zombies across safely?
SET is a fun game that can be enjoyed by kids as young as 6 and is challenging even for adults. It is rich in counting problems and is great for getting people to pose problems. It is also an example of a finite geometry and interesting to explore how well one’s geometric intuition works.
Merriam Webster defines gerrymandering as “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections.” This activity tries to make sense of that definition using a few examples.
