Supporting Material: Virtual Tools

In this lesson, we are tasked with determining a location for a new supermarket to address a possible “food desert” problem in Glastonbury. You will use these diagram to guide your analysis along with tools in Desmos and Geogebra. To qualify as “low access” in urban areas, at least 500 people or 33% of the population must live more than 1 mile from the nearest large grocery store. In rural areas, at least 500 people or 33% of the population must live more than 10 miles from the nearest large grocery store.

How can mathematics help us understand the phenomenon of a pandemic? What factors impact the spread of a disease like Covid-19? Which of these factors can we influence? (society, in schools) How can mathematics help us act during a pandemic toward better outcomes?

What shapes can result from the following fold-and-cut process?
Take a piece of paper.
Fold it flat.
Make one complete straight cut.
Unfold the pieces.
Are all shapes possible?

Austrian mathematician Georg Pick first stated this theorem in 1899. However it wasn’t brought to broad attention until 1969. In this exploration, participants will use rates of change to aid them in discovering Pick’s famous formula by finding a relationship between the area of the figure, the number of perimeter pegs, and the number of interior pegs.

This session is also suitable for student circles or the classroom.

Students will gather data on median household incomes from three towns across Connecticut (including their own town) and will calculate potential future wealth using exponential modeling. Students will compare outcomes of these models and discover factors that impact a household’s ability to accumulate and transfer wealth. Students will understand the complexity and interconnectivity of social issues. Note that this lesson is closer to a 1-week mini-unit, but that teachers may choose certain sections to focus on for a smaller 1-2 day exploration.

In this session, we introduce participants to the programming language, Scratch, by giving them a rich task. As they explore possible approaches to achieving the goals of the task, they naturally uncover the three fundamental structures of programming (conditionals, loops, and sequential statements). We explore multiple approaches to the task, highlighting the creativity involved in programming, and even allow participants to declare their own variables to simplify coding work.

A group of people, some that just met, have a dilemma. Some people owe money and some have money. Problem is that only people that know each other, connected by nodes, can give or lend a dollar. But they must give each person they know a dollar, even if that puts themselves in debt!! Find ways to give money in such a way so that everyone in the group has money or owes 0 dollars.

The rules are simple: you want to place the sheep on the board so that the wolves can’t eat them. A wolf can eat a sheep if it has a direct path to it – or is in same row, column, or diagonal as that sheep. Can you place all your wolves and sheep on an nxn grid so all the sheep are safe?