MAA Prep #2

Our first activity Monday morning was using a sheet of cardstock to make a container with a lid. We were asked to come up with a purpose for the container, measure its volume, and consider issues such as the number of cuts needed and the amount of wasted material.

My partner and I decided we wanted to do something unconventional, and came up with the idea of a pyramid. Here is our finished product. We decided it would be used to store healing herbs and crystals, since we were, after all, in California! The nice thing was that we used the entire sheet of cardstock with no waste.



The rest of the day, and most days to follow, would involve examining activities that could be used to introduce units in a Beginning or Intermediate Algebra course. These have been mainly hands-on activities that have a definite laboratory feel. For example, to look at linearity (and linear equations), the activity involved indirect measurement: "How could you determine how many nails are in a container without counting them?" Thus, we used a scale to measure the weight of one nail, then two nails, and so on to see the linear pattern of increase.

This obviously introduces the idea of slope. The activity introduces the idea of a y-intercept by including the weight of a nail box with the nails. It worked quite well. We then collected forearm length and height data, made a scatterplot, and discussed the idea of a line of best fit.

There have been many interesting activities presented, and they have given me a lot of ideas. The presenters are emphasizing that they do NOT do these activities every class period, rather they use them to DRIVE the curriculum. That is, you do an activity that shows the NEED for a particular mathematical process or function before you teach all of the actual mathematics involved.

I'm not so sure I'm ready to adopt all of their activities, but it seems that some of them could be easily included in my two sections of MTH 095 in the fall.

The other participants have been interesting people with a variety of experience and from several different types of institutions.

Today (Thursday) is a short time, with the afternoon and evening left free for exploring the Bay area. It's a "Spare the Air" day here, since it's a little warmer than usual with lower air quality. That means all public transportation is free, so I'm heading off to BART again to go to SF.