MFM2P - Day 66: Vroom Vroom!

Today's warm-up was the following math talk:

This is what they did:

They came up with lots of different strategies. I tried to help the ones who were stuck at the beginning by asking how much money they would have if they had 18 quarters. 

Next up, Vroom Vroom! This is a Fawn Nguyen activity so you know it's good. I decided that I wanted to leave this one more open-ended and not give students a handout including a table, graph, room for an equation... My students have done a lot of different activities where they have had to collect data and come up with a model so I thought they should be able to figure out what to do with this one without scaffolding it. This is what I showed them:

I put them in random groups, provided graph paper and let them get going. 

I think it would have gone better had the cars gone straight for more than 30 cm (sigh). The data that was collected was okay - better for some groups than others - and the work that followed was the same. Each group did hand in some form of a report. Here is a good one:

Sadly, our attempted competition at the end failed as the cars would simply not go straight. I only got 7 of my 9 cars back and 2 of those are very broken : ( So...if I do this again I will have to get better cars. The positives were that, without much prompting from me, they gathered data, looked at the rate of change, graphed, and came up with an equation (kinda-sorta). And I think that if I give them another similar task, they will run with it.