Conic Section Day 1-3

I always felt that my conic section unit was lacking and needed something that tied everything together. I had a bunch of activities, but nothing that was solid. I decided that the unit needed an overarching theme and some project based learning opportunities. I want it to be engaging and real world.

I settled on roller coasters.

Day 1:
Students have a virtual reality video to watch on DiscoveryVR where they ride a roller coaster. Then they have an introduction to conic sections where they are given play doh and a plastic knife to play surgery, I did this activity last year: Conic Section Surgery

Day 2:

I started with Parabolas and asked them to complete a Desmos Polygraph Activity over Parabolas.

Then I went over the first project with the students, students will construct a working paper roller coaster.









Students started their paper roller coasters.








Day 3:
Students read an article on Newsela about roller coasters and were asked to identify the main point, supporting details, essential elements, and asked them to circle words they didn't know. When they were done reading and annotating they were to summarize the article in two sentences using the essential elements.

Then we went over the first day of parabolas, where students graphed parabolas based on an equation.

Statistics Sampling through Articles

In our statistics unit for Algebra 2, we talk about measures of central tendency then we go over different types of sampling. The four we talk about random, convenience, systematic, and cluster. Students don't really know what these are, we talk about when people are surveyed there are different methods to survey those people. Then we go over survey biases. It is a pretty boring lesson, students already know mean, median, mode, and range. They don't really get why we go over types of sampling.

I trimmed down and this article from The Street:
https://www.thestreet.com/story/13954993/1/pictures-of-mcdonald-s-new-big-macs-are-already-sweeping-the-internet.html

To summarize the article it is about the new Mac Jr and Grand Mac, in the article it says, "McDonald's started testing the Grand Mac and Mac Jr. in more than 120 restaurants in the central Ohio and Dallas areas in April last year." This is the basis of what I wanted the students to pick up out of the article, but thought this might be a good chance to get them inferring reading in the math classroom. 

Students read the article, I gave them 5 minutes to read and answer the following 5 questions:

1. What is the main point of the article?
2. What are two supporting details?
3. What type of sampling method was mentioned in the article?
4. Why do you think McDonald's chose that type of sampling method?
5. Do you think the authors view of McDonalds were positive or negative? Why?

I was surprised about the level of detail that students put into the article here were some sticky notes and students working on the article.

Next year I will try to put the article on ActivelyLearn, last year it was my go to place for articles and mathematics for Junior Standards Math. I will have to use more articles in math class, it was a good experience for me and my students.