Playlist: Bookmarks
What’s In My Brain: Guinea Pig vs Potbelly
What do guinea pigs, shooting stars, and seahorses have in common? They’re all misnomers!
What’s In My Brain: Pentagon vs Pentagon
We’re looking at regular vs irregular polygons.
What’s In My Brain: Ball vs Book
Let’s look at Kinetic vs Potential Energy!
What’s In My Brain: Crocodile vs Tree Frog
Is it a reptile or an amphibian?
What’s In My Brain: Narwhal vs Penguin
We’re looking at the arctic vs the antarctic.
Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)
How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?
Slow Motion Popcorn
What surprises can you spot when a kernel pops in super slow-mo?
Squiggles Collection 3
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
Squiggles Introduction
What do you see in this squiggle?
Squiggles Collection 1
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Squiggles Collection 2
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Zig Zag Cipher (Codes Part 3)
Let’s try a cipher that doesn’t substitute new letters or shapes. We just mix things up.
Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)
Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
How Many Will There Be? Courtyard
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
How Many Will There Be? Checkerboard
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Looking Closely at Holiday Photos
Let’s write from multiple perspectives using an old timey holiday photo!
What’s In My Brain!? Japan vs Jamaica
Is it an island or an archipelago?
What’s In My Brain!? Gold vs Wood
Some of these examples are conductors and some are insulators!
What’s In My Brain!? Walnut vs Clouds
Let’s look at living vs non-living things.
Concept Attainment: Hornet vs Tiger
Can your class spot the vertebrates vs invertebrates?
Earthquakes – Mixed Up Paragraph
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about earthquakes back into the correct order?
Drawing An Impossible Triangle
Here’s how you can draw The Penrose Triangle, an example of an impossible shape.
Drawing Knots, Level 2
How to draw a more complex version of this twisty Henri Matisse knot!
Drawing Knots, Level 1
How to draw a simple version of this twisty Henri Matisse knot!
Concept Attainment: Art
Can your students tell the difference between cubism and abstract art?
A Lunar Survival Mission
A favorite of mine! This task is delightfully complex and ambiguous, forcing students to make choices without enough information and with no right answer. How will they survive on the moon for three days?
Cram
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!
Paradox: Rebuilding A Ship
What if we completely rebuild something slowly? What if we completely rebuild it all at once? Is it still the same thing?
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
Game: Gomoku
Want to take Tic-Tac-Toe to the next level!? Imagine a 15×15 board. You must get five-in-a-row. You cannot get six-in-a-row. That’s Gomoku!
SCAMPER: Scaffolding Creativity
Asking students to “think creatively” won’t get you far. They won’t know how to start, they’ll get stuck with simple ideas, or they’ll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.
Not Like The Others: Planets
Which of these planets is not like others? Well, it sure looks simple at first. But each option could be the one that doesn’t fit in.
Game: Order and Chaos
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
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!
Math Curiosity: The Coloring Problem
No video gets me more email from students! How few colors can you use to color in any map so that no two, neighboring regions are the same color?
Chomp
Chomp away at your opponent in this grid-based strategy game.
Col – A Strategy Game
The first person to run out of regions loses in this strategy game.
Dots and Boxes
Who can make the most boxes from dots in this strategy game?
Sprouts
Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.
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.
Jabberwocky and Context Clues
Context clues lessons can be a disaster. Here, we expose students to a delightful classic packed with nonsense words (“Jabberwocky”) and ask them to decipher the meanings and parts of speech. Then, it’s only natural for students to write their own nonsense poems.
Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes
Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
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!
Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture
The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…
Math Project: What If I Bought Apple Stock Instead?
What if you had an original iPod and sold it compared to if you had bought the equivalent amount of Apple stock and sold that?
Engineering: Build A Bridge
Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.