Playlist: Bookmarks
Broken Calculator: 2-Digit Subtraction
This calculator gets subtraction wrong the same way every time. Can your students crack its broken rule?
Valentine’s Day Codes
Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.
What’s In My Brain: Pentagon vs Pentagon
We’re looking at regular vs irregular polygons.
Grouping Shapes by Parallel and Perpendicular Sides
Which shapes go together based on parallel and perpendicular lines?
Letters With Symmetry
Let’s group letters by their symmetry, then create symmetrical words, and then symmetrical sentences!
New Uses for a Paperclip
So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?
How Many Will There Be? Desks
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Cram
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!
An Escher-Style Tessellation Project
Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!
Game: Snakes
In this grid-based strategy game, who will be the last to add to the snake?
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
Student Introductions With Depth and Frames
Want to introduce the tools of Depth and Complexity and learn more about your students and introduce the Frame graphic organizer? Have I got the activity for you!
Math Curiosity: Magic Squares
Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!
Col – A Strategy Game
The first person to run out of regions loses in this strategy game.
A Donut Investigation
In this cross-curricular investigation, students will look into an intriguing question: do donuts or salads have more sugar? They’ll grapple with misleading information, bias, and use their math skills to create a visual representation of sugar in popular foods.
A Caffeine Investigation – Part 1
So… just how much caffeine can you have before you end up in the ER?
Depth and Complexity: 📈 Trends
Has something been changing recently? What might be causing that? What are the effects?
Depth and Complexity: 👄 Language of the Discipline
Imagine a construction worker who doesn’t know the name of a screwdriver or a doctor who can’t remember what to call your neck. It’s pretty hard to communicate well without knowing the 👄 Language of the Discipline!
Depth and Complexity: ❓ Unanswered Questions
This underutilized tool focuses students on what we don’t yet know and even what we can’t know.
Depth and Complexity: ⚖️ Ethics
Want to add drama to any topic? Use the Ethics prompt!
Depth and Complexity: 🚦 Rules
Is there a consequence for not doing something? You may have found a rule!
Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea
Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.
Depth and Complexity: 📚 Across Disciplines
No topic is an island! With the 📚 Across Disciplines prompt, students note connections within and across multiple fields.
Depth and Complexity: ⏳ Change Over Time
Want to get students thinking about how a topic has changed or might change in the future? The ⏳ Change Over Time thinking tool is just what you need!
Depth and Complexity: 👓 Multiple Perspectives
Every topic looks different depending on who’s looking. This prompt teaches students to see through someone else’s eyes.
Depth and Complexity: Patterns
Can your students spot anything that repeats? Or that has stopped repeating?
Depth and Complexity: 🌻 Details
Get kids focusing on the small, but essential, details of a topic.
Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes
Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?
Creating A Classroom Motto
Starting with specific examples of fantastic classroom behavior, your class will end up with one sentence summing up their expectations. It’s a classroom motto!
Furnishing A Hotel
Design and furnish hotel rooms on a budget. Real math, real constraints, real decisions. Then pitch your hotel to investors.
Engineering: Build A Bridge
Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.