Is Lego Gender Biased?

February 25, 2015October 10, 2018 by Jon Orr

Here was how our conversation in math class (MFM1P) went…..How many pieces make up this Star wars Lego ship? We started with that picture and had a great conversation around Lego.

Then I showed this one.

Does the pool/hot tub have more pieces/less pieces/ or the same? This turned into “boy” Lego vs. “girl” Lego. My personal opinion is its all great…. My 3 daughters are just as excited to play with Yoda as they are with Disney princesses. Girls in the class agreed that they didn’t need their own line of lego!!!

I moved our conversation a little forward with asking Which costs more? And which should cost more?

Answers: Continue reading →

The Power of Match My Graph

February 24, 2015October 31, 2015 by Jon Orr

I was checking out twitter last week and ran into this from Dan Meyer:

You’re about to plan a lesson on concept [x] and you’d like students to find it interesting. What questions do you ask yourself as you plan?

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) February 19, 2015

and I had a concept coming up that I have always had a tough reaction to. I threw it out there.

@ddmeyer @samjshah help! What’s the sell on part c? pic.twitter.com/hPmRzYRCts

— Jon Orr (@MrOrr_geek) February 20, 2015

To get students to be interested in it I wanted them to be “dying” to figure it out.

I thought about putting them in a place where they had to struggle— I wanted to open up the middle!
Michael Fenton has a series of Match my Parabola challenges and I thought of those. I modified his challenges a bit to include those examples from my tweet.

Click to access Desmos page

Continue reading →

Knot Again!

February 15, 2015November 7, 2018 by Jon Orr

I am loving Alex Overwijk’s Knot activity more and more.
Go ahead and read about it!

Ropes of Different Thickness & Equal Lengths

I’m a huge advocate for having kids get their hands dirty and try things out. This one is particularly awesome because students get to experience how the rope length changes. They get to feel and create that change.

For those of you who don’t have ropes….or use this after the activity as part of a consolidation.
Problem 1- Solving a linear equation.
Act 1