Right now we're on the home stretch. At this point, I have finalized all activities/answer keys on my website (at least for the purpose of the fellows presentation). My current focus is on creating my project video. At the moment I have no idea what I am going to say or where I am going to film it, but I guess I'll figure that out soon enough (and probably update this blog post when I do).
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Small update today. I just uploaded a new activity to the "other activities" section. This one focuses on some of the mathematical concepts related to gambling and betting games (specifically, absolute probabilities and expected values). Students apply these concepts first to a simple coin game, and then to the game of American roulette. Finally, they are tasked with creating a game of their own. I considered (and to be honest, I'm still considering) adding a section about slots, but I sort of decided that the activity was long enough at that point, and I wasn't sure if that section would add enough value to avoid redundancy. That's all I have for today. See you in April!
First blog post in March! I just uploaded a new activity on this website. I ended up skipping chapter nine in the Algebra one book temporarily (I couldn't think of any good ideas for an activity before, but I will probably revisit it now) and went straight to chapter ten, the final chapter. This section of the book is all about data analysis. In the activity, students have to construct a 3 question survey to conduct in their community, then use different data analysis techniques to analyze the results. These include creating two-way frequency and relative frequency tables, dot plots/histograms, and other types of graphs, analyzing the data distribution and outliers, and estimating means/medians. The hope is that they are able to use the data in order to come to some kind of conclusion about the people in the community they surveyed.
Unfortunately, I was not able to complete my goal of creating three more worksheets before Spring break (I only got to two). I am finding that I have less time to work on my project now that Spring sports have started. I think I will really try to push myself over break and get three more done (instead of two) then. I'll be back with another update soon! Final blog post for February.
I just uploaded another worksheet to the website, this one centering around writing/solving quadratic equations. The real world application is a bit exotic this time; students have to work out some of the logistics of owning a cruise liner. The inspiration came from a fairly common type of word problem, which involves finding the speed of a boat through water given a particular river current speed (as well as a few other pieces of information). Because the current affects the boat's speed relative to the shore differently when traveling upstream vs. downstream, the equation for time ends up being quadratic. For some reason, this worksheet took me a very long time to put together. I just had a hard time piecing together the different parts of the activity in my head, and I spent a lot of time sitting at the computer without making much progress. I am still not completely satisfied with it (in particular, I am not sure if the necessary "hints" I provided for the some of the problems are quite clear enough), but I am happy enough about it to post it on here. I think I will leave it for now and perhaps come back to it again later. Well, I finally got around to finishing the additional website that I have been talking about. Here is the link: https://miches611.wixsite.com/realtimemath
I decided to use the program "Wix" for this. Personally, I found it to be much more versatile, customizable, and user-friendly than Weebly. I will to continue to update this website (along with my weebly) as I get more work done on my project. Overall, things are going fairly well; I am excited to put all of my efforts into making new worksheets/answer keys again. We will see what the rest of this semester holds in store. Oops. For the second time in the past week, I've had a dream where I remembered something that I was supposed to do (but forgot to do) in real life. Looks like January only got one blog post, but that just means February will get a little extra attention.
Unfortunately I don't have a ton to update at this time (I feel like I say that a lot). All of the answer keys have been uploaded to this website. I decided to publish them separately instead of attaching them to the ends of their respective worksheets. I just thought it would be more practical to have them as a separate product. After all, it's probably better for the worksheets not to have a readily available answer key attached to the end for students to look off of as they work. I am still working on making a separate website using "Wix" to be the base of my project; I will post the link when that is finished. As a final note, I met with Ms. Lepi a few days ago to touch base. We both seemed to think that I am at a pretty good place right now, so that gives me a little more confidence moving forward. I'm here with another blog post. To be honest, I didn't really work on my project at all the first two weeks after break; it sort of fell out of my focus. However, I'm back now and ready to get some good work done in the coming months. Right now, my primary task is to figure out how I am going to integrate the answer keys I've been making into the worksheets I already have. I will probably either attach them to the end of each sheet, or include them as separate documents (most likely the former option). Once I have done that, I will get started creating more activities. In terms of numbers, my goals is probably to complete around 5 more worksheets this semester. In line with Mrs. Carsley's recommendation, I will also be thinking about how I can combine the worksheets to create more of a unified product. Maybe I will try to upload them on a separate website? I definitely need to look more into my options here. That's all I have for now. By the time I write another blog post, I will probably have finished dealing with the answer keys. We'll see where things go from there.
Once again, I don't have much to say in this blog post, but there are one or two things to update since a few days ago. First, I added another activity to the "other activities" section. This one focuses on the use of ratios/proportions in cooking (particularly, when adapting a recipe). I worked on this over the summer, but then abandoned it for some reason. It took only a couple of hours for me to put it together into an acceptable format. That being said, I do have an idea for an improvement, so I will be posting an updated version probably tomorrow. This isn't very relevant, but one thing I find funny is how my writing style tends to somewhat mimic whatever I am reading at the time. I remember that, while making this worksheet, I was reading one of my English summer reading books, in which the author makes a lot of attempts at being funny/witty which, in my opinion, fall completely flat the majority of the time. Unfortunately, I found that the writing I had to do for this worksheet was filled with similar failed attempts at humor. I did my best to remove all of them as I was finishing/formatting it.
At this point, I have reached my winter break quota. That being said, since I feel like I kind of cheated with the second worksheet, I will still be working on my project for the remaining days of break. I just realized I've been forgetting to do my blogs this month, so I thought it would would be a good time to finally enter my first December blog post.
I just added one more worksheet to the "other activities" section. This one focuses on describing motion through kinematics equations. In it, students perform actions like dropping a ball from a fixed height, tossing a ball in the air, and rolling a ball across the ground. Then, they use kinematics to make approximations about things like how hard/far they threw the ball, and how quickly it accelerates. Finally, there are some extra (optional) kinematics practice problems at the end which I shamelessly stole from Ms. Wesley. I may make edits to this in the future. Particularly, I'm debating whether or not I should add a quick explanation of scalar and vector quantities, and I am also considering providing an explanation of how the equations are derived/why they work (I did provide a source at the end explaining this). My only worry is that some of these worksheets are getting a bit bogged down by lengthy explanations, so I'm trying things as brief as possibly while still making enough sense. This upcoming week, my goal is to create one more additional worksheet. I suppose I'll have to make another update in a few days, but I'm not sure how much I will be able to say at that point. Overall, I feel pretty good about the progress I'm making with my project (and I'm enjoying working on it). Hello.
Just now, I have updated a few things on this website. First, I uploaded the updated versions of a few worksheets I made over the summer. Making answer keys for a few of these worksheets earlier in the year definitely gave me better insight into how well some of the questions/activities actually work (mostly, some questions ended up being a lot easier or harder than I initially expected). For this reason, I made a few edits as I went along. Second, I uploaded two more worksheets, and a third will be coming in the next few days (I just need to add/format one more section). The third activity is a 2nd worksheet based on chapter 5 from the algebra I book which centers around the process of potassium-argon dating to find the age of volcanic rocks. Initially my plan was to do carbon dating, but the math for that ended up being a bit more complicated than I intended, leading me to decide that it wasn't quite as applicable to what I was going for. I will keep the old activity on this website because I think it is still (a tiny bit) valuable, despite its many flaws. The first activity I made (for chapter 6: build exponential functions and models) takes the same concept from my original chapter 5 worksheet (modeling epidemics), but consists of entirely different questions. For chapter 7 (polynomial operations and models), the main activity involves creating a floor plan of a home. Students must include the relative dimensions of each room (represented as monomials/polynomials), and then use the total square footage of their home (based on a pre-determined budget) to find the real dimensions of the house. To do so, they have to add/subtract/multiply monomials and polynomials in order to create an equation, which covers the real meat of the chapter. Additionally, I tried to give them as much freedom as possible in terms of what they can do with their house design. That's all for now. I think I am making decent progress at this point. Eventually, I will probably make a new tab on the website and upload answer keys/sample answers. I don't think I will end up creating an answer key for every worksheet, however, since some are too open ended for it to have any value (in my opinion). |
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