Playlist: Bookmarks
Words Within Words: RAINBOW
How many words can you find within rainbow?
Greekymon Studies – Round 1
What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?
Factors and Codes: First Names (Episode 2)
Scrambled up somewhere in 161,000 is a first name. Can you find it!?
Factors and Codes (Episode 1)
Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.
Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)
How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?
A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong
Let’s go roller skating in a Halloween costume! What could possibly go wrong?
Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
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!
Words Within Words: Intro (SOLDIER)
How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?
Categorize and Re-Categorize Animals
Put these animals into groups. Then do it again. Then… do it one more time. How does re-re-grouping the same creatures reveal new patterns and give new insights?
Famous Structures
The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House — group them, pick the best from each group, then design your own.
What’s the Pattern? Fraction Addition
Can your students figure out how to add fractions by looking for a pattern?
Back to School: Rewriting The Beatles’ “Help!”
Can your students come up with a one-syllable word to sum up their time away from school? And then rewrite The Beatles’ song Help!?
Drawing Knots, Level 1
How to draw a simple version of this twisty Henri Matisse knot!
The 8th Wonder of the World Tournament
Which of these eight wonders deserves to become the Eighth Wonder of the World!?
New Uses for a Paperclip
So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?
Looping Grid Art
Pick a few numbers, draw some corresponding lines on grid paper, and you’ll end up with some interesting, looping math-y 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!
An Escher-Style Tessellation Project
Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!
Measurement: An Elephant
What if I told you that an elephant weighed a back-breaking 176,000? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? But… how many corgis would that be?
Math Curiosity: Klauber’s Triangle
In 1932, a leading authority on rattlesnakes, Laurence Klauber, discovered a startling pattern within a triangle of primes.
Holiday vs Holiday (from a Mascot’s Perspective)
Want something to do during the holiday season that is both fun and involves thinking? Get students writing about what a snowman would think about Halloween or what a ghost would think about Thanksgiving.
Evens and Odds – Addition and Subtraction
When we’re adding and subtracting, do evens make odds into evens? Do odds make evens odd? Which one has… more power!?
Virtue or Vice?
Aristotle noted that positive traits and negative traits are often the same thing, but just in different amounts. The right amount is a virtue, but too much or too little and it’s a vice.
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.
How Many Ways: 2 Digits ÷ 1 Digit = 1 Digit
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
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?
Investigating Christmas Trees
Start with facts about Christmas trees. Group them. Label them. Can you boil it all down to one big idea?
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?
Dots and Boxes
Who can make the most boxes from dots in this strategy game?
Math Curiosity: Odds & Squares
Why does the sum of the first 5 odds also equal 5 squared?
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.
Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?
Create A Creature
Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
Furnishing A Hotel
Design and furnish hotel rooms on a budget. Real math, real constraints, real decisions. Then pitch your hotel to investors.
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?