Ruth and the Taco Cart

I love Dan Meyer's Taco Cart if you have never heard of it, here is the task it is great it is wonderful.

http://threeacts.mrmeyer.com/tacocart/

We were recently doing this activity in Algebra 2, because I love how it uses the Pythagorean Theorem and one of my students asks, "what if you split the angle in half and walked that, because that is what I would do." I thought that would be a wonderful geometry question.

Ruth and the Taco Cart

I posed this question to my geometry students, we weren't really learning about angle bisectors, but we had already learned it as well as trigonometry. It took them about 15 minutes to use pythagorean theorem and find the time it would take. However, Ruth was much more difficult.

After students completed the time section I asked what they needed to find the angle and the distance Ruth would have to go.

There were lots of good questions. I gave the rest of it as homework and only a few were able to do it completely.

For students that did the work, I had them work in a group and work on a couple of extension problems:

• If Ruth didn't want to talk alone, how long would she have to wait for the other to catch up?
• What if she took a different angle?
• Does changing the angle effect the time it takes for her to get to her destination?

The other students continued to work on the problem and were given some of these extension problems as they got the answer.

I loved the use of geometry, I will definitely use this when we are learning trigonometry.

License Plate Combinations

When we come back from winter break we normally start our probability and statistics unit. I normally take a week for probability and a week for statistics which normally melts into three weeks. I've always thought nothing of changing it, but during winter break Dan Meyer posted "Plates Without States"  Since we were going over permutations and combinations I thought this would be an excellent way to get students thinking about how many different combinations there are in license plates and why they make them like that.

To start the lesson I had students go through Dan Meyer State-Plate Game.  Students were definitely engaged and loved playing against each other in their groups.

Next we talked about license plates and I separated it from combinations and permutations.

I gave all of the students a blank license plate and a card. The card had a name of a city or state and a population that students had to take in consideration.

Here are some of the license plates that students were working on.

When students were done with their license plates, they took a picture of their license plate and put it on SeeSaw. The last part they had to do was comment on three others the number of different combinations that they had with their license plate.

Here were a few students figuring out and commenting on other students post.

I like this activity much more and students realized how license plates play a role in local governments and how the population of an area can control the different license plates possible.

I posted almost all of them in the back of my room here are a bunch of different ones that are posted.