MFM2P - Day 35 (Speedy Squares, Part II)

I chose an Easter themed Estimation 180 for today's warm up:

I have had students write their estimates on small whiteboards and hold them up, but this time I went around the classroom with a big whiteboard and recorded their estimates. This ensured that everyone was participating and let me see how close they were to the answer. Once I had everyone's estimate written down I asked for reasoning. One student said that there were "9-ish" layers and then we counted around 9 or 10 eggs per layer.

I know that some students just guess so I hope that showing them how to reason through to an answer will help them with future estimations. Two students had the exact answer and got chocolate Easter eggs as a reward!

We continued with Speedy Squares from yesterday. I have updated the handout (there were a few "oops" on my part). I collected the times that they calculated to build a 26 by 26 square:

My students did a really good job determining the relationship between time and number of blocks based on their data. I helped them by asking how many cubes they had in their 2 by 2 square and what the associated time was. They ran with it from there.

They needed a little guidance to "design" a house - really just a top view of the floor plan with approximate, but realistic, dimensions. I drew an example to help guide them. Most designs were simple but good. There were, of course, a few crazy ones that were ridiculously large or small.

Once they had calculated their square footage, they used the Lego My House site to determine how many blocks their house would need. 

Then they used their equation relating time and number of blocks to find the time it would take to build their house out of blocks. The time they calculated was in seconds so they had to finish by converting it to days so that it was a more meaningful answer.