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Ozobots and Piecewise Functions

It's always fun when you can bring robots into your math class, and I was able to do this recently! The gist: students were given a large sheet of paper with a coordinate plane. They were tasked with creating a city and having the Ozobot travel around their city completing commands based on student code. The path of the Ozobot was a piecewise function and students created equations based on the functions. All this was completed in pairs or groups of three. I was short on time because the Ozobots were only available for one class period, so students did not have enough time to come with a written storyline, but each group was able to verbally explain the path of their robot. One group actually chose to use "Stranger Things", Hawkins, as their city- and even explained that they knew the function wasn't one-to-one! This project is a fantastic way to get students engaged, it has a little something for everyone. All students were 100% engaged for the duration of the class
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Intro to Confidence Intervals- Hershey's Kisses

I know that I was not the creator of this activity, and I have no idea who is... but it was a great way to introduce confidence intervals for proportions. In the past, I have used the thumbtack opener, but SAM's club was calling my name for a ginormous bag of Kisses! This activity encompasses all of the introductory notes for this lesson; therefore I just jumped right in and skipped the note-taking. We collect a large sample of trials, check conditions, use prior knowledge of sampling distributions, discuss population vs. sample and parameter vs. statistic, etc.  The new stuff is also embedded into this activity. Students are introduced to the phrases: margin of error, point estimate, and confidence interval (duh). The gist: students are given 5 Kisses, a cup and the student sheet (see below). They are to shake the cup and drop the Kisses on their desk, count how many land flat on the base and repeat for a total of 10 drops and 50 combined Kisses. We create an interval for each stu

Solving Rational Equations

  I was feeling festive last October, so I created a Halloween theme solving rational equations Google Slides activity. I love Halloween, so creating a spooky assignment was so much fun! In this assignment, students must solve 8 rational equations. Each question corresponds with an answer on the last slide. Students will move the spider next to the answer to the corresponding question number. Once the students are finished, the phrase will spell out HAUNTED! I know that students could probably figure out the phrase; however, I created a student worksheet where students must show all work in order to receive credit. Fast forward to this semester, I wanted to use the same activity, but I obviously can't use Halloween. You know what that means, I just had to create a spring theme activity! In the spring activity, students must move the flowers to spell out RAINBOW.  Halloween Student Edition  Halloween Student Worksheet Halloween Teacher Edition Spring Student Edition  Spring Student
Opening Day Activity for AP Statistics: Hiring Discrimination I have tried many different opening day activities for this course: Smelling Parkinson's, Distracted Driving, Crazy in Love, Find Someone, Desmos Scavenger Hunt, etc. But I wanted something new... so off to Google I went. I found that Sarah Carter ( mathequalslove ) does this activity for her Day 1 AP Stats class. And since she's awesome, I figured I'd try it too!  It is an activity that can be found in The Practice of Statistics , which IMHO, is a fantastic textbook. I like that it did not need to be modified very much in order to fit as course opener. I did tweak this a little, however. I wanted to make sure to start from the beginning of the class with the State/Plan/Do/Conclude format. I also like the fact that I will be able to bring this up later in the class for some sort of inference procedure (not there yet). I love giving students back work they completed on Day 1 and watching them realize how much they

Exponential and Logarithmic Review: Sum of Three

 I broke out the Sum of Three again. I just love this activity! I posted the student sheet in our online course, but you can email them. Students work on groups of three problems each, at their pace and in the order they want. There are four groups for this particular activity. Students may work alone, in pairs or in groups of three - I would not have groups larger than three since that would leave the others with nothing much to do. Once students have completed one group of three problems (groups are listed below), they take the sum of all of the answers and put the sum into the form (linked on the student sheet). If they are correct, they move on. If they are incorrect, they will get an error message and will need to figure out what went wrong. They do this for all problem sets until they can submit the form. Problem groups Solving Exponential Equations Solving Logarithmic Equations Solving Natural Logs Solving Challenge While I used this as a quiz review for Precalculus, it could al

Precalculus Activities for Remote/F2F/Hybrid

The 2020-2021 School year was a mess! Our district started as remote, moved to AA/BB day Hybrid in October, and then open to all in April. This basically meant that students could come F2F full time, F2F part time, or remain remote. They could also decide any morning which option they were feeling. Needless to say, it was crazy! Because of all the craziness, I was not able to keep up with this blog very often. Therefore, I decided to put all of the new and (hopefully) improved activities we did in Precalculus in this one post. Everything on this page is workable for all of the student options mentioned above. Applications of Exponential and Logarithmic Functions  (Drag and Drop) Exponential and Logarithmic Functions Recap (Sum of Three Activity) Key Features of Polynomial Functions (Desmos Activity) Sinusoidal Modeling Clue (Drag and Drop) Trig Identities: Escape the Building (SlidesMania) Circle Trig Recap (Deck.Toys) Right Triangle Trig Applications (Drag and Drop) Ambiguous Ca

Composite Functions

Whether you introduce composite functions in Math 3 or Precalculus, here are a couple of options to spice up your lesson! Option 1 I like using this activity in my Precalculus class as an introduction to composite functions. This could be used as an exit slip on day 1 of teaching this topic or a stand alone activity on day 2. Part A (Number Line) has students evaluating composite functions with specific values then arranging the slides in numerical order. Part B (Cut and Paste) uses two functions: f(x) and g(x). Students are to evaluate both f(g(x)) and g(f(x)); if they are correct, they will find their answer on the final slide of the presentation. Students will cut the answers and place it in the appropriate location for that problem. If the learners are incorrect, their answers will (probably) not be found and they will need to redo the problem to find their mistake. Here is the key for this activity. Option 2 I used this activity as a project and allowed students to work with a