Friday 26 June 2015

Exeter Conference - Day 6

Today is the last day of the Exeter Math Conference. We have shortened classes and everyone leaves by 1 pm. It has been a fantastic week - lots of interesting and fun math, great company and really good food (including a lot of ice cream!).

The participants in my class have been amazing - they have jumped right in and tried everything. We have had lots of productive discussions and really learned together and from each other.

We started by looking at a couple more examples of warm-ups: Would You Rather and Open Middle. My Thursday blog posts from this past semester have write ups about Would You Rather warm-ups. I am looking forward to adding some Open Middle questions to my warm-ups for September.

I had saved the Barbie Bungee activity for today and they loved it. The idea is that you have to determine how many rubber bands to use to make a bungee cord for Barbie so that she has the biggest thrill possible without getting killed. 


We decided to drop from the 2nd floor (which is actually 2 flights of stairs up) of the science building. I measured the height, which was about 7 m, while my participants were working on their models. And then the challenge was on. I dropped each of their Barbies and am happy to report that they all survived the experience! This is a really fun activity. I have blogged about it here and here.

I had one last thing to show which is my day 1 of calculus activity. I have my students recreate a set of Desmos graphs. Some are to refresh the students on polynomials and some use animation, which is not something that my students have played with before.


The blog post, including a video, is here. If you want a link to the actual file, please email me.

And with that, my week at Exeter comes to an end. I really hope to have the opportunity to do this again next year. You can find information on this amazing conference here.


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