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Playlist: Bookmarks

Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)

How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?

Van Gogh Self-Portrait Tournament

Who will win the tournament of Van Gogh self-portraits!?

Updating Old Questions: Comparing Two Leaders

For Teachers

How I’d upgrade a dull “which one is better” question.

Robot Writing: Volcano

Read three pieces of writing from three different robots about the same beautiful painting of a volcano. Who wrote it best?

Think Like An Author: Hemingway vs Dickens

What if your students rewrote Dickens in the style of Hemingway and vice versa?

Depth and Complexity and Graphic Organizers

For Teachers

Let’s see a few examples of how Depth and Complexity slides nicely into any graphic organizer.

Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Famous Structures

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

Why I Don’t Use “Create” in Bloom’s Taxonomy

For Teachers

The word “Create” can mask low-level tasks. Here’s why I avoid using it in objectives.

Racetrack – Race Around A Graph

How fast do you get your mathematical car going without crashing?

Drawing An Impossible Triangle

Here’s how you can draw The Penrose Triangle, an example of an impossible shape.

Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game

Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?

Parabolic Curve Art

Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.

Writing About Art: Chōshi in Shimosha

Get your students writing some pretty darn impressive poetry based on Japan’s most famous artist.

New Uses for a Paperclip

So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?

Create A Civilization: Design A Flag

What makes for a good flag? What makes a bad flag?

Antonym Paths

Does the antonym of an antonym bring us back to the same meaning?

Thinking With Art: Head Down

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

Game: Gomoku

Want to take Tic-Tac-Toe to the next level!? Imagine a 15×15 board. You must get five-in-a-row. You cannot get six-in-a-row. That’s Gomoku!

Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle

Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.

Math Curiosity: Goldbach’s Conjecture

Can any even number be written as the sum of two primes? Goldbach thought so, but we haven’t proven it… yet!

Running A “Notice, Wonder” Lesson

For Teachers

Use these puzzling images to build a classroom culture that is comfortable with curiosity, ambiguity, and taking intellectual risks.

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.

Paradox: Crocodile Dilemma

A crocodile makes a deal. But the deal creates a paradox. Can your students untangle a 2,000-year-old logic puzzle?

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!

The Resiliency Tournament

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy

Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?

Lines, Line Segments, Rays, and Infinity!

A lesson about lines, line segments, and rays that avoids dull memorization. Instead, we ponder this delightful question: Which is longer, a ray or a line? Then, kids consider what these different geometric concepts would think about each other.

Deducing the Area of Triangles

Using patterns, students try to deduce where that area formula came from.

Passive to Active Voice

In this lesson, students will not just fix passive sentences, but break active sentences as they learn to put the star of the sentence first.

Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle

What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… forever!?

Showing A Character’s Trait

We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction

Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.

Climbing Bloom’s with Depth and Complexity

For Teachers

Bloom’s tells you how high to aim. Depth and Complexity tells you where to look. Combine them and things get interesting.

Math Curiosity: Finding Primes

Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!

Academic Love Letters

What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?

Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?

Percents and Credit Cards

Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!

Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes

Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?

An App For A Historical Figure

What kind of an app could have helped Abe Lincoln accomplish his goals?

Greekymon

Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.

Asynchrony: Developing At Different Rates (For Students)

For students! In some areas, a student may be shockingly advanced, while in others… surprisingly average. This is asynchrony in action.

Romeo and Juliet Summary

Romeo and Juliet in just about five minutes.

The Game of 100

Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?

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?

Intellectual Intensity

Do you know someone who becomes a bit overexcited by ideas?

Think Like An Economist

How would an economist read Goldilocks? How would they see a rainforest? How would they study the American Revolution?

Impostor Syndrome

For Teachers

The student who breezes through school may hit a wall in college. Here’s why — and what to do about it now.