Shasta County Office of Education
Human Graphing Activity
Take graphing outside and make a giant coordinate plane to plot your human points. Young graphers are each given a coordinate for a particular shape and asked to make the geometrical shapes one by one. Those not plotted are to write down...
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Spreadsheet Tutorial 3: Column Graphs, Error Bars, and Standard Error of the Mean
There's absolutely no error in using the tutorial! Learners use spreadsheets to create column or bar graphs with error bars. They also learn how to calculate the standard error of the mean in the tutorial. This is the third installment...
Teach Engineering
Start Networking!
Class members create their own social networks by collecting signatures before graphing the interactions with their fellow classmates. The degree distribution of the simulated social network is determined by calculating the degree of...
Teach Engineering
Matching the Motion
It is not always easy to walk the straight and narrow. In the sixth portion of a nine-part unit, groups actively recreate a graph depicting motion. Individuals walk toward or away from a motion detector while trying to match a given...
Illustrative Mathematics
Graphs of Quadratic Functions
The equations look different, but their graphs are the same. How can that be? This activity leads your mathematicians in an exploration of three different forms of the same quadratic function. After comparing the equations, their graphs,...
Annenberg Foundation
Skeeters Are Overrunning the World
Skeeters are used to model linear and exponential population growth in a wonderfully organized lesson plan including teachers' and students' notes, an assignment, graphs, tables, and equations. Filled with constant deep-reaching...
PBL Pathways
Students and Teachers 2
Examine trends in student-to-teacher ratios over time. Building from the first task in the two-part series, classes now explore the pattern of student-to-teacher ratios using a non-linear function. After trying to connect the pattern to...
Illustrative Mathematics
Puzzle Times
Give your mathematicians this set of data and have them create a dot plot, then find mean and median. They are asked to question the values of the mean and median and decide why they are not equal. Have learners write their answers or...
Illustrative Mathematics
Puppy Weights
Nobody can say no to puppies, so lets use them in math! Your learners will take puppy birth weights and organize them into different graphs. They can do a variety of different graphs and detail into the problem based on your classroom...
Illustrative Mathematics
Chocolate Bar Sales
In this real-world example, algebra learners start to get a sense of how to represent the relationship between two variables in different ways. They start by looking at a partial table of values that define a linear relationship. They...
Teach Engineering
Energy on a Roller Coaster
Roll with your class into the idea of conservation of energy. Pupils use a roller coaster track to collect data to reinforce the concept of conservation of energy and the influence of friction. Class members then create a graph from...
Baylor College
Global Atmospheric Change: The Math Link
Change up the classroom atmosphere with this interdisciplinary resource. Following along with the children's book Mr. Slaptail's Curious Contraption, these math worksheets provide practice with a wide range of topics including...
Teach Engineering
Using Hooke's Law to Understand Materials
Provide a Hooke for a lesson on elasticity with an activity that has groups investigate a set of springs. They use a set procedure to collect data to calculate the spring constant for each spring using Hooke's Law. The groups...
PBL Pathways
Death Project
Verify the rule of thumb for finding the time of death. The project-based learning task asks pupils to determine when the rule of thumb process of finding the time of death is appropriate. Learners develop a function for the rule and...
Illustrative Mathematics
Graphs of Power Functions
This activity consists of three exercises in which learners sketch the graphs of various power functions on the same axes. They use their sketches to make comparisons and observations which lead to generalizations about the graphs...
Curated OER
Classroom Supplies
Challenge young mathematicians to buy classroom supplies by staying within the means of a $1,000 budget. The mathematical activity provides learners with the opportunity to decide what items from the supply list would benefit a class of...
Firelands Local Schools
Exponential Growth and Decay
How can you safely model exponential growth and decay? A hands-on activity uses candies to model not only exponential decay, but also exponential growth. Exponential equations are fitted by hand and by use of a calculator...
Teach Engineering
Ranking the Rocks for Desired Properties
Math rocks! Cavern design teams determine the rankings of rock types based upon desirability points. The points are connected to the properties of the rocks and their usefulness in building a cavern.
Teach Engineering
Density Column Lab - Part 2
Groups suspend objects within layers of liquids to determine the densities of different liquids and compare them to the densities of objects calculated in Part 1. The groups then carefully test their calculations by layering the...
Curated OER
Sunrise, Sunset
What locations on Earth get the longest number of hours of daylight in the summer? Hint: It's not the equator! Use real-world sunrise and sunset data to develop trigonometric models that can be used to estimate the number of hours of...
Illustrative Mathematics
Electoral College
A cross-curricular resource that takes the electoral votes and allows your learners to organize and analyze the data. Young voters can determine which states are more influential and interpret the dotplot provided for more data....
Teach Engineering
Density Column Lab - Part 1
Mass and density — aren't they the same thing? This activity has groups use balance beams and water displacement to measure several objects. The pupils use the measurements to calculate the density of the objects.
Howard County Schools
Planning for Prom
Make the most of your prom—with math! Pupils write and use a quadratic model to determine the optimal price of prom tickets. After determining the costs associated with the event, learners use a graph to analyze the break even point(s).
101 Questions
CoinStar
Would you rather have a bowl of dimes or a bowl of quarters? A video introduces the problem by presenting two bowls, one full of quarters and another full of dimes. Learners use information from a CoinStar receipt to calculate the number...