Exponential Growth through TAG

After a great day of teaching exponential growth and decay, I felt like my students really knew the topic forwards and backwards. We did this Desmos activity as some students were finish up their MAP test.

It was a great Desmos activity, almost all the students wanted 100$ at the beginning and very insightful finishing questions at the end and I was pleased overall. Later that day I began to wonder if students would notice if something was exponential or not exponential if I gave it to them. I thought to myself how could I find a question that I could do that would model exponential growth or decay.

Then I found this game: 

I wanted an activity that got students out of the classroom. Since I have two periods at the beginning of the day we did inside in the gym, but the last time we went outside and played it on the Football field.

If you didn't watch the video, it is a simple game where one person is a shark, they yell "Minnows come out to play." the minnows job is to make it to the other side without getting tagged. The sharks job is to tag people, once a minnow is tagged they become a shark.

Here comes the math:

I had them start out with one shark, I made all the others line up and asked them how easy it was going to be this time down. All of them were confident that they could make it down without any real sweat, then I asked them what about the 5th time down? I was surprised how most of them thought it was still going to be easy, thinking of it linearly instead of exponential. We played it through the first time here are the pictures and the charts we did at the end.

Here is one of the charts that I made after each run down and back.

After all the students were tagged on the 4th down and back with ease. I asked them to estimate how many would get tagged on the fourth time back. Then I asked about the whole school, how many down and backs would there be playing with 576 students?

We came back after playing 2-3 more times. Then asked them how you could write an equation to model the graph. We did a short mini-lesson on finding equations of a exponential graph.

Solving Trig Ratios and Google Expeditions

Last year I did a solving trig ratios using Google Cardboards and the app Google Cardboard, but on Android devices the app is different from one platform to the next, so I needed an upgrade. I have been looking at Google Expeditions for a while now and finally had enough Google Cardboards and extra VR headsets (thanks Alice Keeler!!).

Google Expeditions was a great app and it allowed me to introduce other concepts like history combined with math. Another added benefit was that most of my students are from Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala and some of these ruins were close to where they use to live.

My favorite thing is that I can direct students to look at something while reading and comes with questions to ask the students. I didn't use all of the questions, but I did use the intermediate question when it came to the number of steps. I could direct students to use their made sextants to find the angle of elevation to answer the questions.

Here are some of the students on their expedition.

Here is a link to the worksheet that students had to fill out and guide them: goo.gl/uRcvkR