Exeter Conference - Day 5

We started with a little 3-act fun from Andrew Stadel. Here is his blog post about Filing Cabinet with all the links to the videos. Here is my blog post from the latest time I have done it with my students. 

I also showed them some of Nathan Kraft's craziness (that's crazy in a good way, of course). Toothpick insanity and Starry Night.

Then we played Polygraph: Parabola from Desmos. It was a lot of fun and everyone saw how the game encouraged the use of correct vocabulary and helped you create better questions by showing you what others had asked. 

We also took a quick look at Central Park.

I probably sound like a broken record, but if you haven't tried Desmos Activities, you really need to check them out!

Time to get up and get moving! Tying Knots was next. The first part of this activity involves determining the relationship between the length of a rope and the number of knots in the rope. I really like this because, unlike most linear data collection activities, this has a negative rate of change. 

We skipped the part involving putting everyone's data together to be able to find the relationship between the diameter of the rope and the rate of change (but it's on the handout) and moved on to figuring out how to get the ropes to be the same length with the same number of knots. 

All but one of the groups got it to work which led to interesting discussions and to me adding what you see below for next time. 

I have blogged about the Tying Knots activity here, here and here and the handouts are here and here.

We took a quick look at some Always-Sometimes-Never statements and discussed how these can be really good warm-up activities that help students think beyond just their initial reaction to the statement.

I then gave a choice of matching activities.Quadratic (credit to the teachers at Sir Wil for that one), rational, right-angle trigonometry or combinations of functions.

A couple of participants then had a quick but lively game of log war. I think I originally got these from Kate Nowak, so I'll give her due credit.

And, finally, I showed off some of my students' parabolic art - art work created entirely with quadratic equations. Here is that activity's blog post and this is one of my favourites: