We're finishing up our unit on linear equations and ended it with scatter plots and the line of best fit. For some reason, I enjoyed this topic and we did several interesting activities involving them.I did this age of famous people activity suggested on Twitter by @Fouss but I redid it myself which I tend to always do. It worked pretty well and each student had different types of correlation which was helpful. We also did this spaghetti linear lab which I stole from http://www.ilovemath.org. It was interesting and I really liked it, but you need tons of pennies! One piece of spaghetti will hold up to 50-60 pennies and the experiment tests out 5 pieces of spaghetti. I liked this lab but the rate of change definitely was not constant. Some students' data caused the slope to be 0 which created some interesting results.
We then did my modified version of Dan Meyer's hot vs. crazy. Dan was brave enough to use himself but I don't date and most of my students know me personally enough that I just didn't even go there. So I had them pick people to judge for themselves. I could say that I was trying to promote ownership of the data but I was really just trying to promote them out of my business.
We wrapped it up with this powerpoint on correlation vs. causation which I owe all to @smallesttwine.She gave me some great, random ideas to use for examples. Some of my classes had a hard time deciding how to make up a scatter plot without any data. By the end, we were discussing more than graphing, but that was okay with me, and naturally lent itself to this worksheet I stole from a Google search but can no longer find the original link to. I thought about giving a quiz but decided I had already assessed the heck out of scatter plots.
Up this week we'll be starting solving systems of equations. Any ideas?
In the geometry world, I was lucky enough to find a great wiki from @tperran which has been extremely helpful. We started a new unit on polygons and I have easily adapted his powerpoints to fit my class better. They are more creative in the practice and examples given than I have been, and I appreciate that. Here are my adaptations on polygons, parallelograms, rectangles, rhombus, and trapezoids.
Up this week we'll be talking about kites and perhaps building our own rhombicosidodecahedrons.
The End.
I'm going to try the spaghetti one, its funny that you didn't get a constant linear function. I wonder how many data sets the original writer used. I have a class of 4 (long story about teaching overseas in a small American school), but I can add a few students from other classes and study halls to generate more data points.
ReplyDeleteAll together I had 33 students do this and I don't think any of them got the same rate of change. Of course, there will always be errors to account for when experimenting.
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