Transversal Tag 🏃

One of my favorite geometry activities I did this year was Transversal Tag. I set up the gym so it had the pattern of a transversal, like the picture below:

Students were randomly assigned a number 1-8 and then a tagger was randomly chosen. I am sure this game would have been much better to play with 3-4 taggers and play freeze tag, but we played that if you were tagged you became a tagger as well. Also if you went to the wrong area you could be tagged and become a tagger as well.

The taggers had to decide which angle congruency to say to get the most amount of people. For example, a favorite to choose was alternate exterior angles, because half of them had to run to the other side of the gym. The taggers also had to be smart about choosing ones where the runner will be going. 

Especially closer to the end of the game the taggers had to come together to talk about which one would move the most amount of people and get a specific person out.

Students used the following:

Alternate Exterior

Alternate Interior

Corresponding

Consecutive Interior

Vertical

Linear Pair

It was a quick fun game that would have lasted longer if it was freeze tag, but the students had fun, used vocabulary, and had fun running around the gym for 20 minutes instead of being in class.

Head's Up: Review Game 🗣️

Head's Up! is a game of charades where the person puts their iPad or iPhone on their head and the audience performs and nods down for correct and backwards for pass. For students this was one of the best review games we used for vocabulary for geometry.

Students stood up in front of half the class and used my phone to show the students. This was excellent for students coming up with moving actions for such words as vertical angles and supplementary angles. Students were better able to self define vocabulary words better than previous, plus students had more fun reviewing.

It costs .99$ for the app and an additional .99$ to make your own cards. Well worth the money.

Coding Inequalities 💻

Coding in the classroom has always been an interest to me, Hour of Code is a great resource for any teacher especially those just starting out. For the past two years we have been doing Hour of Code during the Hour of Code week and that has been the most coding we do all year. What I wanted in my classroom was more coding, because I think coding could be the future for most of my students. I also believe that coding can be a gateway to other mathematical principles that are taught in the classroom such as: growth mindset, support productive struggle, and promote reasoning and problem solving.

So we have started in the math classroom is using one day a unit to work on these skills by implementing a way for students to apply their mathematical knowledge and coding. Students are given a task write code to make a calculator to solve an inequality. Students had to write code in Trinket.io to write their inequality.

We were going to use Swift by my Seniors do not have the iPads supported to do it, so we decided for everyone to use Trinket. Some students really loved the problem solving aspect of coding, using the blocks to get the numbers to do what they want them to do. Other students were not happy about trial and error process to finding the answer.

I have some other upcoming units to try this out with like Pythagorean Theorem.