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Playlist: Bookmarks

Hero or Not A Hero?

Students will determine what makes a hero a hero.

Tournament of Mythological Creatures

Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?

Don’t Make A Mere Model!

For Teachers

This task is all about the product, but completely ignores how students will think.

Greekymon Studies – Round 3

What might a creature named “Aquacornus Rex” be like?

Greekymon Studies – Round 2

What might a creature named “Hypermnemonicus” be like?

Greekymon Studies – Round 1

What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?

Types of Energy Tournament

Which type of energy will win the tournament!?

Slow Motion Popcorn

What surprises can you spot when a kernel pops in super slow-mo?

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?

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!

Famous Structures

The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House — group them, pick the best from each group, then design your own.

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?

Developing Questions that Prompt Thinking in Math

For Teachers

Math is a particularly tricky subject for asking higher-level questions. Here are a couple of techniques I’ve used to prompt students to think, not merely calculate.

Thinking With Art: Head Down

One artist, two paintings. Notice details, compare, synthesize, then find a parallel in another creator’s work.

Inferring With Art: A Man

What’s going on in this painting? Who is that guy? What’s his job? And where’s his other boot?

Inferring With Art: A Couple

What’s going on in this room? There are shoes everywhere! Are those… oranges? Let’s make some inferences!

Inferring With Art: Two Women

What are these two women up to? What’s that thing she’s holding? Let’s make some inferences!

An Escher-Style Tessellation Project

Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!

Word Ladders Introduction

You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.

Writing A Thanksgiving Letter

What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?

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!

Asking Questions That Make Students Think

For Teachers

Most classroom questions test memory. These questions test thinking. There’s a difference — and your students will feel it.

Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.

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.

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.