Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Omega Unlimited & Dy/Dan 'Toasty Lessons'

If you have been following  Dan Meyer’s blog and the Toast experiment, then you likely saw Chris's response on his Omega Unlimited blog. I couldn't but help notice how similar this work was to my 7th grader's introductory work to y=mx+b, graphing and their relationships. 

While I'd say that my student's remained more interested in their own projects and finishing those, the riveting introduction to the class Monday to the toast video was incredible. A few moments into the plotting of their data points and it became clear that what they have is not totally linear. 



So, it was a hit and it raised as many math questions that I could have guessed would happen. What great stuff. 


Future steps for me include making sure to take the context of all of our work and guide it in to the most contextual arena I can. I don't know that displaying and working on the toast with my class would be the very best way, but it was a fun way to get the day started. With minutes as their time unit, the best answer they got was y=1/2x+1.5 Clearly, a few issues still exist that need to be ironed out.



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