Playlist: Bookmarks
Squiggles Introduction
What do you see in this squiggle?
New Uses For A Pencil
So, what can a pencil be used for other than writing and drawing?
Racetrack – Race Around A Graph
How fast do you get your mathematical car going without crashing?
Create A Civilization: Currency
What type of currency will your civilization use? What symbols will be on it? Why are they significant?
Ultimate (or Inception) Tic Tac Toe
What if each square on a Tic-Tac-Toe board had another Tic-Tac-Toe board inside of it?
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?
Fractions: Decompose and Recompose
What if we took a fraction apart, then took those pieces apart, then recombined them, and then recombined those, arriving back to the original fraction?
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
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.
Characters Dressed as Other Characters for Halloween
What if one character dressed up as another for Halloween? Would the Cat in the Hat pick Captain Jack Sparrow, because they’re both chaotic yet good-natured people? Would Elsa dress up as The Ice King since they are both lonely?
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
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?
Col – A Strategy Game
The first person to run out of regions loses in this strategy game.
Why Is Our Calendar So Weird!?
Why are there 12 months? Why don’t weeks fit into months evenly? Why don’t weeks fit into the year evenly? What’s going on with the calendar!
Place Value (Beyond Base 10)
Place value is something we cover in elementary school. It seems simple, but I’d wager that very few adults really understand the topic. I sure didn’t until I worked with non-base-10 number systems in college. Your students can get a taste of this mind-boggling experience by imagining what it would be like if we didn’t have the number 9. What would each digit represent then?
Analyzing Movies’ Success
So should we make another movie in this series?
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!
Create A Civilization: From Hunter Gatherers to Farmers
What happens when your civilization suddenly has a surplus of food? Think of the possibilities!
Create A Civilization: The River
The Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Seine, the Thames, and now… your river!
Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number
You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?
Create A Civilization Introduction
Your students build a civilization from scratch — rivers, flags, calendars, currency, government. Social studies, science, and writing woven into one year-long project.
A Visual Guide To Dividing By Fractions
Have you ever wondered what it looks like to divide by a fraction, man?