Day 148: Basketball

Algebra is getting into quadratics. They know a bit about vertex and how to determine what direction a parabola will open. To keep momentum after introducing quadratics, I pulled a great acitivty from Dan Meyer’s Blog again.

Last year I spent an entire day on guessing and tracing where the ball would end it. It was a bit of overkill. This year I spent about 20 minutes on it, which was a good amount.

Students came up and traced the path they thought the ball would follow.

I threw the pictures into desmos and fitted a curve to them.

We watched the end of the video.

After a couple, students picked up that the ball followed the same path on the way up as it did on the way down. They are pretty comfortable with quadratics now and finding the max,min,vertex, and axis of symmetry.

Day 112: Basketball

I used today as review in both algebra and geometry. There are a couple different types of review I have tried in the past. Racecar Math and Station Reviews have been my go to. Today I tried Basketball, which I found over at Dan Meyer’s site.

Every period was really into it. There is never a flawless type of review but this was definitely worth the time. I picked up a mini ball for under $5, set up my trash can on a wall, and put these rules up on the board.

1.  I will put up a question.

2.  You will answer it on a sheet of paper (turned in).

3.  Once you have an answer, stand up.

4.  Correct 1 = shot, Incorrect = 1 shot for me.

5.  Once you have answered correctly, you may not stand up again till everyone in the room has tried.

Other notes

• Talking = 1 shot for me
• You can pass your shot off to someone else
• Three people can shoot per problem
• I am terrible at basketball

I ended up losing to every period but of them. Most of the time it was down to the wire and students were on the edge of their seats cheering. There were some random name that state flag and capitols thrown throughout the mix.

For those wondering, we averaged about 14 review questions per period. This was a lot of fun!