Girl Math

I was recently collaborating with a group of NC Math 3 teachers, I truly learned a lot from them while working that project! One thing that went across my computer screen during this collaboration project was the "Birthday Polynomial" activity. Sounds straight forward, right? Just use Desmos, right? "What could possibly go wrong", I asked myself.  Well, many things went wrong.  For starters, almost all students were born in the same year and the graphs were hard for my students to manipulate. They also had an issue with all of the zeros (2003 was the popular year of birth). Needless to say, I put out many fires that day. I knew I had to revamp this activity, not ditch it, as there are a lot of great features and learning points (a little pun there). Introducing the " Personalized Polynomial " activity. In this version, we go from a polynomial with a degree of 7 to one with a more manageable degree of 3- what we mainly use in class anyway. Students ar...

While there are many introductions to this unit, I wanted to create something that was more fresh than the activities I have done in the past. Hence, I Googled. I found an activity similar this one, but it cost money. So, I spent about 30 minutes creating my own! I have always avoided using the "Guess the Age" of celebrities since it changes yearly... but heights don't! Here is a link to my presentation; feel free to copy and edit according to your tastes and your students' interest. I also forced a copy of this spreadsheet to my students. This way they could copy/paste their data into Desmos. This was pretty fun, I may want to add a couple more celebrities the next time I try it. I also had everyone save their graphs in Desmos so that when the "Achieving Linearity" component of this unit popped up, everyone could choose their best fit model based on residual plots and numerical summaries.  It was fun and little more updated than some past intro ac...