R2D2 – Pear Deck/Desmos Mash Up!

August 20, 2015October 31, 2015 by Jon Orr

School is just right around the corner for us up here in Ontario and I can’t stop thinking about that first day. As for my grade 9 applied class’ first day I have ran the R2D2 problem in the past with great success.
Now, over the summer I’ve seen great improvements in Pear Deck and wanted to get into it! Also Desmos has been busy and released Activity Builder!! So let’s mash these two apps up with some R2D2!!

So here is the R2D2 problem presented with Pear Deck and an extensions with Desmos….

Act 1: The video

and this is what Pear Deck will show after you insert the video…..love how the video will be displayed on the projector and not on each individual device!!!

I like using Pear Deck here for asking for wonderings and notices because it allows students who normally won’t shout out answers to have a voice in the room. Students get to input their responses and the teacher can show them on the projector.

For generating estimates I absolutely love how they put our Too high and Too low guess on a number line…..it gives us the visual of where our actual estimates will lie.

Act 2: Gathering the Info

In the new version here I get students to draw their estimates of the dimensions of both the board and the post it note…..this pushes them into drawing diagrams.

Revealing the dimensions….

Students are ready to solve….

Act 3: Revealing The answer

The Extension: How many rectangles can we make that have an area of 609 post it notes?
To extend I want students draw out different rectangles and label their dimensions! They can use Pear Deck’s white board!

But then they can enter them into Desmos through a pre-made activity I created in Activity Builder. (the Pear Deck file links to the Desmos activity).

For each rectangle the student can come up with they find the perimeter and plot the length vs. perimeter in the Desmos graph. The teacher on the projector can use the Overlay function and show all the different rectangles students are coming up with…essentially showing the pattern that emerges! Using the pattern students can read off the minimum perimeter!

If you have a Pear Deck account Grab and download the file below!

[aio_button align=”center” animation=”none” color=”blue” size=”medium” icon=”star” text=”Pear Deck File” relationship=”dofollow” url=”https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9g0jeaVwshveDVhWktzdTRudE0/view?usp=sharing”]

Link to the Desmos Activity

Final Assignment – Estimation Challenge

June 18, 2015January 28, 2016 by Jon Orr

For our final activity I started the off with this……

we filled in too high, too low, and best guesses! Then we checked the answer…..

Completing this challenge got the students pumped and hooked into doing some math on our very last days of class (especially with some students exempted from the final exam). Our final assignment is to …

We got out the iPads and I let the kids work….. here is what a few came up with:

A lot of kids did water filling or post it note covering estimates. Some kids ended up making an all-out 3 Act math problem.

Zack

How many caps will fill the marker?

Estimate & Answer

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Alexis

How many cups to fill the shape?

Answer:

—————————————————————————–

Meghan

A 3- act task in Explain Everything:

How many post-its will cover this triangular wall:

Act 1: She put a photo and a small video in Explain Everything to start us off.

Act 2: She provided us with a little more info after we made some guesses.

and

Act 3: Made a time lapse video and provided a screen shot with the answer

Grab her Explain Everything File here

[aio_button align=”center” animation=”none” color=”blue” size=”medium” icon=”download-alt” text=”Grab the EE File” relationship=”dofollow” url=”https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3zQp-gapBCeVmU2anF4Ty1DOUE/view?usp=sharing”]

—————————————————————————–

Tiana

How many stickies to fill the door window?

And hit us up with a time lapse video for the answer:

—————————————————————————–

Celina

How many water bottles will fill the hexagonal prism?

and the answer

Watch the water fill up by grabbing her Explain Everything File

A fun last few days….and I’ve got some new estimates for class next year.

Guess Who & Polygraph Lines

June 12, 2015October 31, 2015 by Jon Orr

As we come to the end of the semester review days are here. To help grade 9s review properties of linear relations we played Guess Who. Last September I ran Guess Who with my grade 12 Advanced Functions class with great success. I made up a new sheet for grade 9 with a variety of linear relations (graphs, equations, and tables).

Guess Who game sheet

The students played a few rounds each! The questions coming out were pretty good! I overheard lots of “Does is show direct variation?”, “Does it have an initial value?”, “Is your graph decreasing?”
All great terminology I love hearing from my grade 9 applieds!!

After a few rounds of “low tech” Guess Who, we broke out teacher.desmos.com and “high tech” Guess Who —– Polygraph – Lines.

Students use a class code to access the game. Round 1 is playing the orginal guess who with pictures of people against the computer.
The system then links you up randomly with another student in your class. You take turns each choosing a graph and asking questions to guess your opponents graph!

Again, great questions and discussions here! I could see the deep thinking about what questions to ask to eliminate options. Desmos once again out does it! Linking up digital resources while keeping learning social!

These students have been great to teach this semester! I’ll miss them next year!!

Show what you know in Gameshow!

June 3, 2015October 31, 2015 by Jon Orr

Last week, Kyle Pearce wrote a post on running GameShow by KnowledgeHook. I was drawn to this idea mostly because of review time coming up and wanted a nice way to practice EQAO multiple choice type questions. GameShow is great for that. I love that it works on any device. Students can use their phones, iPads, laptops, etc to submit their answers.

Today I created a custom GameShow to practice simplifying algebraic expressions with my students. KnowledgeHook has a bank of questions already to go…..I just did some picking and choosing of questions I wanted to tackle and added them to my newly created custom gameshow.

Screen Shot 2015-06-03 at 12.05.47 PM

I stressed to my students to not worry about any time in the game. These multiple choice questions are not about speed. Let’s make them about accuracy. They played in teams of two with whiteboards beside their devices. I asked them to show full solutions on their whiteboards.

What was awesome while playing our GameShow today was that once students submit their answer they can upload a picture of their work!!!

On the teacher side, I could see how many solutions were uploaded for each answer option. Screen Shot 2015-06-03 at 12.22.07 PM As a class it was great to choose correct answers and analyze them. All answers are anonymous until the teacher clicks the reveal. It was equally rewarding to analyze the incorrect answers and talk about how we can make them better!!! Students seeing each others’ solutions is powerful!

Since I asked for all solutions to be uploaded the students started putting more effort into their answers! I find when we use other software like this, putting in an answer is like a game. “How fast can I get it in” Uploading slows it down and puts an emphasis on the solution! Like it!!! That’s the way a gameshow should be played!!!!

This program is super new so head on over to https://knowledgehook.com/gameshow/ . It’s free. And has content build right in. Even if you’re not from Ontario you can have access to the free bank of Ready Made gameshows or create your own. You actually don’t even need to teach math to make use of the gameshow!!!

ipad

R2D2 – Pear Deck/Desmos Mash Up!

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Final Assignment – Estimation Challenge