Playlist: Bookmarks
Natural Disasters Tournament
Earthquake vs. hurricane. Tsunami vs. wildfire. Students set the criteria, argue their case, and crown a champion. Warning: it gets heated.
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Geometry Image: University Ave
What odd and interesting shapes can your students find in this geometric image?
An Olympic Sized Pool and Jet Fuel (Episode 3)
How many times could you fill up a jet plane using the fuel that would fit in an olympic-sized pool?
Five Sets of Bird and Bug Idioms
Five sets of idioms related to birds (and bugs).
Tournament of Ancient Inventions
Which of these inventions of the ancient world is most influential? Least useful today? Most taken-for-granted?
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?
Game: Number Scrabble
What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!
Not Like The Others: Natural Disasters
Four natural disasters. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
Math Curiosity: Klauber’s Triangle
In 1932, a leading authority on rattlesnakes, Laurence Klauber, discovered a startling pattern within a triangle of primes.
Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project
Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!
How Renewable Is That Resource?
Which resource is more renewable? And which is easier to find?
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?
Finding The Volume of Laptops
How has the volume of laptops changed over time? You know you want to check out how huge those first versions were!
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
Fractals: Koch Snowflake
You could keep zooming in on this snowflake forever!
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.
Better Stories Part 1: The Big Idea
We open our unit on narrative writing with a big idea: “structure increases creativity.” I show how this is true by bringing in examples from across all disciplines.