Playlist: Bookmarks
Halloween Emoji Story 🎃
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
New Uses For A Pencil
So, what can a pencil be used for other than writing and drawing?
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.
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!
How Many Will There Be? Pyramids
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
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?
Writing Technique: Contrast With Synonyms
A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We’ll be contrasting two ideas using synonyms.
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.
Numerator or Denominator: Which has more power in a fraction?
What do you do with students who already get their fraction operations? Give them a contrived project about recipes or pizza slices? Make them solve annoyingly hard practice problems? Please. Here, we get students thinking in a whole new way, pondering which has more power, the numerator or denominator.
Sets of Idioms
Why do we say ‘break a leg’? Five themed sets of idioms your students will actually remember.
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?
Building Creative Analogies
We’ll take two seemingly unrelated pieces of content (say volcanoes and the human body) and then build analogies to connect the two ideas. In the end, students can create a skit, comic, or story relating the two concepts.
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
Math Curiosity: Waring’s Conjecture
So, can you write every odd (greater than 3) as the sum of three primes?
Creating A Realistic Flower and Pollinator
Your students will create a new flower, designed to attract a specific pollinator.
Create A Creature
Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.
A Nutrition-Based Math Project
Let’s create a parody ad attacking a surprisingly calorie-rich meal.
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?