PBL Pathways
Medical Insurance
Design a plan for finding the best health insurance for your money. Learners compare two health plans by writing and graphing piecewise functions representing the plan rules. Using Excel software, they create a technical report...
Teach Engineering
The Great Gravity Escape
Groups simulate an orbit using a piece of string and a water balloon. Individuals spin in a circular path and calculate the balloon's velocity when the clothes pin can no longer hold onto the balloon.
Teach Engineering
Magical Motion
Make solutions to projectile motion problems magically appear using equations. Pupils watch a clip from a Harry Potter movie and find the length of time it takes for a remembrall to fall into Harry's hands. They use a projectile motion...
Teach Engineering
Better By Design
Which modification is the best? Using the scientific method, pairs determine the effects of each control surface on the distance of a glider's flight. The activity, section 16 in a 22-part unit on aviation, allows pupils to gain a better...
Curated OER
Repeating Decimal as Approximation
You are used to teaching repeating decimals with bar notation that keeps us from writing that number over and over again; now teach what the over and over again represents. This activity allows your mathematicians to explore the infinite...
PBS
Population Simulation with M&M's
Math and M&Ms® go great together when introducing a modeling activity. Allow your learners to simulate population growth and decay of fish in a pond and share their reasoning for the change in fish. With such an impact we have on our...
Bowland
Explorers – Patrol Services
Far out — plan a trip to space! Aspiring mathematicians steer a space vehicle through an asteroid field, calculate currency exchanges to buy provisions, and determine placement of charges to blow up asteroids. Along the way, they learn...
Concord Consortium
Looking through a Window
Here's a window into graphing calculators. Scholars use a graphing calculator to plot a quadratic function. They then adjust the window to make the graph look like that of a linear function and must recreate given graphs.
American Statistical Association
Confidence in Salaries in Petroleum Engineering
Just how confident can we be with statistics calculated from a sample? Learners take this into account as they look at data from a sample of petroleum engineer salaries. They analyze the effect sample size has on a margin of error and...
PBS
Garden Grade 6 Area and Perimeter
Engage young mathematicians in applying their knowledge of area and perimeter with a fun geometry instructional activity. Through a series of problem solving exercises, children use their math knowledge to design...
Virginia Department of Education
Logarithmic Modeling
Explore logarithms and logarithmic regression. Young mathematicians first learn about inverse functions and about the logarithm function family. They take their newfound knowledge to use logarithmic functions to model situations and...
Teach Engineering
About Accuracy and Approximation
How accurate are robots? Groups draw lines by moving robots backwards and forwards by one rotation of the wheels. Using the appropriate formula, they determine the percent error in the length of the lines in relation to the calculated...
Teach Engineering
Bone Mineral Density Math and Beer's Law
Hop into a resource on Beer's Law. A PowerPoint presentation introduces Beer's law as part of calculating bone density from X-ray images in the sixth instructional activity in the series of seven. Individuals work on practice problems...
Kenan Fellows
Man vs. Beast: Approximating Derivatives using Human and Animal Movement
What does dropping a ball look like as a graph? An engaging activity asks learners to record a video of dropping a ball and uploading the video to software for analysis. They compare the position of the ball to time and calculate the...
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Simple and Compound Interest
Your learners will get lots of practice calculating simple and compound interest by the end of this lesson. Simple explanations and examples lead learners through the concepts and steps of calculating simple and compound interest...
Houston Area Calculus Teachers
Area and Volume
An AP calculus lesson begins with an activity to determine the volume of a solid using a cross-section. Next, learners review the ways to find the area between two curves , as well how to find the volume of a solid created...
PBL Pathways
College Costs
Predict the year that college costs will double in your state using linear modeling. The first part of this two-part project based learning activity asks young mathematicians to use data from the College Board. They graph the data,...
PBL Pathways
Medical Insurance 2
Make an informed decision when choosing a medical insurance provider. An engaging lesson asks your classes to write piecewise models to represent the cost of different medical plans. The project-based learning activity is a variation of...
101 Questions
Meatballs
Your classroom will overflow with learning as they analyze the volume in a pot of meatballs. Young mathematicians predict the number of meatballs that will make a pot of sauce overflow. They incorporate both the volume of cylinders and...
Discovery Education
By the Foot: The History of Measurement
When is a foot not a foot? When you use the length of your own foot to measure distances, of course. To underscore the importance of standardized units of measurement, middle schoolers engage in a series of activities that ask them to...
EngageNY
Searching a Region in the Plane
Programming a robot is a mathematical task! The activity asks learners to examine the process of programming a robot to vacuum a room. They use a coordinate plane to model the room, write equations to represent movement, determine the...
Project Maths
Probability and Relative Frequency
It's all relatively simple once you get the gist. Young mathematicians learn about sample spaces and simple probability by conducting an activity with dice. To complete the second of six parts in the Statistics and Probability unit, they...
Teach Engineering
Designing a Spectroscopy Mission
In this mind-bending activity, young engineers explore this question of whether or not light actually bends. Using holographic diffraction gratings, groups design and build a spectrograph. The groups then move on research a problem...
EngageNY
Conditional Relative Frequencies and Association
It is all relative, or is it all conditional? Using an exploration method, the class determines whether there is an association between gender and superpower wish through the use of calculating conditional relative frequencies. The...