With minimal setup and maximum freedom, young geometers are encouraged to think outside the box on a seemingly simple application problem. Though the task seems simple, measuring a given paper clip and finding how many 10 meters can...

Teach the basics of measurement and conversion with a five-lesson resource that builds an understanding of proportion and measurement conversion from elementary through high school. Initially, young scholars use ratios to determine soup...

Chart your way to an understanding of nanoscale. Using a Google map, learners estimate a radius around their location of 1,000 and 1,000,000 meters. Predicting what 1,000,000,000 meters would look like takes them off the charts!...

Teams learn about the size of a nanometer by measuring objects and converting those measurements. A worksheet then tests the groups' abilities to use nanometers by having them determine the size of objects that are too small to...

Do flexible circuits change dimensions during fabrication? Groups use GeoGebra software to measure the length of pictures of flexible nano-circuits. To determine if the circuits change dimensions, future engineers use Microsoft...

Groups use a marble to determine the viscosity of household fluids. The procedure calls for pupils to measure the amount of time it takes a marble to fall a specified distance in the fluids. Using unit conversions and algebra, the teams...

Explore the measures of central tendency through a challenging task. Given values for the mean, median, mode, and range, collaborative groups create a set of data that would produce those values. They then critique other answers and...

Teams must determine the size of cavern needed to house the citizens of Alabraska to protect them from the asteroid impact. Using scaling properties, teams first determining the number of people that could sleep in a classroom and then...

Jada has a rectangle board that is measured in inches. Young learners confirm their understanding of converting inches to feet. Then they find the area in square feet. Jada thinks she has a short-cut to convert inches square to square...

Learners are given a volume of a rectangular tank and are asked to find the water height. Because the total volume of the tank is given in liters, your geometers will need to use a unit ratio to convert to centimeters cubed. The exercise...

Explore the effect of outliers through an analysis of mean, median, and standard deviation. Your classes examine and compare these measures for two groups. They must make sense of a group that has a higher mean but lower median compared...

Create an egg-citing study of energy. Pupils investigate the effect of height and mass on the overall amount of energy of a falling object. The fourth segment in a six-part series on energy uses a weighted egg falling from different...

Candlelight is in the eye of the distant beholder. Scholars first watch a video clip of a commercial claiming that the human eye can see candlelight from 10 miles away. They use this information to calculate how far we can see...

The road to a better understanding of engineering lies with bridges and tunnels. A set of four engaging activities teaches learners about engineering concepts related to construction projects. They perform an experiment to find the...

Don't let the learning in your classroom get jammed up! Intrigue your scholars with an open-ended scenario to explore. A video presentation shows a challenging stretch of road that is susceptible to traffic jams. The task is to determine...

A question to ask your class is, How fast is your Internet? That depends on the data transfer rate (DTR), which is the unit rate used in this activity. Math students will calculate how long it takes to download a music file and a video...

Even though pennies seem to be relatively thin, stack enough of them into a single stack, and you could have quite a high stack. Enough so, that the final result can be a surprise to you as well as your class. This activity centers...

The class gets to practice being a mathematician in ancient Greece, performing geometric application problems in the way of Eratosthenes. After following the steps of the great mathematicians, they then compare the (surprisingly...

Elapsed time is a skill developed by the single question that is the center of this activity. Fifth graders are asked to find out the time that is 2011 minutes after the beginning of 2011. This question addresses the standard that...

Compare sizes of microscopic items. Given a set of labels of microscopic objects, pupils try to place them in order from smallest to largest. Scholars then compare their lists to the actual comparisons along with the measurements of the...

There is more than one way to answer a question; especially when you have fractions in measurement. Here are three questions with real-world situations in which 5th graders are asked to provide answers in three ways: a larger unit of...

A multi-step problem has learners finding the actual area based on a scale drawing and then converting units at the end. Two different solution choices are listed depending on the preference on which step to start first. Both methods can...

How efficient is a motor in a LEGO set? Future engineers conduct an activity where a LEGO motor-generator system raises an object to a specified height. They then show what they learned and use their measurements to calculate the energy...

The humble soda can gets the geometric treatment in an activity that links math and science calculations. After a few basic assumptions are made and discussed, surface area calculations combine with density information to develop an...