Take what you find interesting and turn it into something challenging, something provocative for someone else.
–Dan Meyer (2011): [anyqs] Hurricane Irene Edition
I’m looking for a good reference for project-based math. Where students face the real-life problems, and learn math as they try to solve them, yet covers the entire curriculum in a complete way.
What I’m considering right now is to swap in some of the real-life questions for some of the sections in the text that consist of rather pedantic word problems, things like: the sum of two numbers is three times less than the square root of the second plus the reciprocal of the first.
Instead, I’d rather do problems like determining the height of a tsunami, which can be treated in different ways depending on which math class you’re teaching, and tie into the science classes (like Physics) as well.
Dan Meyer is a proponent of the project based approach, and he has a lot of interesting problems on his blog.
Andrew was working on calculating the load for the walls of the log cabin he is helping to build. They had to figure out how quickly to taper the walls (diameter of the logs) as it went up and then the roof load and spans. It made his brain work.