Movies in Math. Math in Movies.

Here is a website with a compilation of short movie clips on math and physics that you can freely download. http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/index.html I use the Shrek clip as the introduction to inverses and contrapositives in Geometry.(This one was also on YouTube.) The PowerPoint I used is in the Box widget.

Perpendicular Lines “… flip it and reverse it…”

This is Missy Elliot. She will help us w/ our lesson today on perpendicular slopes. (If you don’t know this song, no worries, all your kids do. And if you really don’t, it will be SOOOO much cooler if you still sing/ rap the lyrics at the end!!) Give each group/pair 1-3 lines to graph. [...]

M&M Catapult

I’ve been eye-ing this for awhile now so I was so excited to run this!! SO excited! I first read about this from Sweeney Math and seriously fell in love with it because the math in it is not forced. I really dislike those forced math projects, though I must admit, I use them sometimes [...]

Egg Bungee

The screaming egg of a good bungee None of these projects are my creation and as much as I would love to give due credit for this one, I really can’t remember where I got this from! It has also been adapted and tweaked a lot before getting to what it is now. I have [...]

Quadratic Shapes and Songs

I was demonstrating what the solutions of an equation like ax^2+bx+c = 0 could look like graphically. I asked the class, “What is the shape of THIS?” as I circled the ax^2+bx+c in the equation up on the board. Amidst a few yells of “parabola!,” I heard a very serious response of “an oval“. I [...]

Calling for conceptual help!

I know I’m a nerd when a question like the following is my hot topic of the day: “Why is it OK to replace a row in a matrix with the answer from adding two rows?” For example, in solving for: x + y + z = 0 x – y + z = 2 [...]

An exciting MISTAKE

I usually start off the systems of linear equations section with a CBR activity where in their group they have to use two TI-graphing calculators and two CBRs to match 4 different graphs. It’s a great activity because it gives them exactly what the graph looks like in real time. This means that they can [...]