Stats Puzzle

Jennifer Gonzales at Cult of Pedagogy wrote an excellent blog post yesterday Frickin' Packets that did a great job distinguishing between different kinds of worksheets teachers use from worksheets that are just busy work that she calls busysheets to worksheets that "directly support student learning" that she calls powersheets. Jennifer also writes about how sometimes the technology we use in class is really just a busysheet in disguise. 

One of the kinds of busysheets Jennifer rails against are word search puzzles. And naturally I thought "Hey I have a word search worksheet I made that is not a busysheet!" I'm not sure Jennifer would think its a powersheet but who knows. It's time to share it so I give you Stats Puzzle.

Click through to download a full copy of Stats Puzzle to use in your classroom.

I use this worksheet on the first day I am going to teach descriptive statistics. I think I collected the words initially from the IB SL syllabus but they are pretty standard words so this should work with whatever curriculum you are using. (I've used it for Non DP and even college intro stats courses too). I created this worksheet a while ago (I need to write on this blog more) and I think I made the initial word search using puzzlemaker.com. 

Here is how I run the lesson. I give students five minutes to find as many stats words as they can in the word search. When time is up they tally the number of words that they were able to find. From here we collect each others data on the board and then I lead a discussion where I invite students to use the words from the word search to talk about the data we collected. We also define words as necessary. This always proves to be very fruitful, we are able to fill the board with charts and graphs and connect the vocabulary immediately with an activity they participated in. It also gives me a sense of which words the students already have a solid grasp of and which vocabulary they are less familiar with. It is also much more enjoyable than defining lots of terms by using the bland deck of power point slides provided with the textbook.

If you are going to teach stats this year download this worksheet and give it a shot. if you'd like give me some feedback on Pinterest, Twitter, or share it with a friend, that would be awesome.

Factoring Puzzle

Two or three years ago I discovered a nifty factoring match up worksheet on Pinterest. I thought that it was pretty neat but I also wished it could be more of a puzzle. The brainstorming began. My mind drifted to two puzzle types that sometimes appear in Games Magazine. Analograms and A to Z. In A to Z there are 26 pictures and the reader has to label each one of them with one letter of the alphabet. This inevitably gets tricky –is that winter apparel a jacket, a coat, or maybe even a parka? In Analograms the reader has to supply the second half of an analogy using two words from a word bank, these also get very difficult in the same way as A to Z.

When I have given  students these puzzles to play around with after a test or something they find them extremely engaging. Sometimes so much so that teachers have confiscated them in other classrooms. These were my inspiration while creating this Factoring Puzzle worksheet. If you don't aim for the stars...

SOME OF THE FACTORING MIX UP PUZZLE WORKSHEETS I WAS INSPIRED BY

In Factoring Puzzle in addition to matching up the factors (just like in the Factor Mix Up Worksheets) each factor is also assigned a word. So students need to make all the word pairs match up as well. To make the worksheet more of a puzzle I repeated factors and added decoy word pairs, for example DOG HOUSE and HOUSE CAT are two word pairs that make sense but only one of these is in the actual puzzle solution. I hope this will be fun and engaging while also helping students practice their factoring! I purposely didn't copy the problems from the Factoring Mix Up worksheets while making this version so if there are any repeated problems this is purely coincidental. 

I am sure that students who are not good at factoring are going to approach the puzzle by multiplying out word pairs that they think are viable solutions and this is ok. When I notice students using this as their only strategy I will be able to intervene and give them targeted help. I think my Chinese students will also learn some additional two word phrases. Check out the puzzle below and download a copy if you want to try it out. Give me some feedback on Twitter or Pinterest if you'd like as well, that would be awesome.

CLICK THROUGH TO DOWNLOAD A COPY, EDITABLE IN ILLUSTRATOR IF YOU HAVE IT.

Finally, here is what the factoring pieces look like. One thing not posted here (and hopefully not anywhere else online anytime soon) is a key to this puzzle the kids can work that out for themselves!

2 Cents on Worksheets

If worksheets had feelings they would be feeling pretty bad these days. It seems like every time I am in a professional development session about anything (math related or not) the professional developers take potshots at worksheets and teachers who assign them. Admittedly there are some pretty bad worksheets out there and I guess if your classroom revolves entirely around worksheets that might be a problem.

It is true that sometimes new technology like Khan Academy might be a better way to practice a skill but sometimes a well designed worksheet will also fit the bill. I like to create puzzle worksheets.  I think good worksheets offer something you can't get from just doing problems in a textbook or on Khan. I try to make my worksheets interactive, engaging, and fun, while also offering practice with a topic. I also really love the Doodle Math Worksheets that Math Giraffe shares on her site and sells on Teachers Pay Teachers. This was going to be a post to introduce a new puzzle worksheet I just created for Factoring Trinomials but I will save that for the next entry. If you are curious you can find all of the puzzle worksheets I have created here.

Log Puzzle

If you search for "Log Puzzle" in Google the first few hits are for a very clever packing puzzle with physical logs that I (of course) have a copy of in my too big puzzle collection. Anyhow, I've wanted to make a new math puzzle worksheet using basic logarithms for a while now and today was finally the day. (And yeah it took forever.) The initial idea was to make my own version of one of those maze worksheets but somehow I ended up with a design that is kind of a cross between dominoes and the iOS puzzle game Flow.  

I STARTED WITH A DRAFT ON GRAPH PAPER.

I decided to make the puzzle bigger so next I drafted a larger version and planned out all the routes. (I am not going to share a picture of this since it would give away the solution to the puzzle.) Next, I created lots of basic equations with similar answers, trying to have many logs that would have positive, negative, and fractional answers. Finally, I created the whole thing in Illustrator and populated the puzzle with equations using Math Type. For some reason the parenthesis would not export out of Math Type into Illustrator so I had to screen shot these which is why some of the equations might look a little different. As I filled in the equations I tried to make the puzzle tricky by adding false routes, and grouping similar answers near each other. In case the puzzle is too tricky I made two versions of it, one where the ends of the snakes are revealed and one where they are not. You can download the puzzles below and give them a shot. Let me know on Twitter or Pinterest if you like them! As always I haven't posted the solution anywhere to keep them off Google for as long as possible.

CLICK THROUGH FOR A PDF VERSION OF THE PUZZLE, IT'S EVEN EDITABLE IN ILLUSTRATOR IF YOU HAVE IT.

Far Side Code Breaking

Code Making and Breaking are a great hook for talking about functions, inverse functions, one-to-one functions etc. I've gotten great mileage out of this worksheet in every class I've used it, from honors to general track. Next week I am going to try it out with my students here in China. I encoded the captions to the four Far Side cartoons using a simple substitution cipher –like you would find in a newspaper cryptogram. I think the cartoons make the exercise more engaging. 

Click through to download this file as a PDF.

Below is the slide I use to introduce the exercise. The carrot cartoon I chose is pretty dark but Larson's Far Side comic is often dark. (I don't think any of the captions or cartoons I chose for the worksheet are as dark.) Some students have actually never seen the Far Side before! Students usually initially think this task is impossible and usually let me know this. I am relentless, I encourage them to look for a "door-way" that will let them into the puzzle. The two most obvious entry points are in comics one and four. They feel really accomplished when they crack the codes. A nice extension activity for keen students is to have them find their own comic code it similarly. 

Speed Graphs

This is a quick graph matching worksheet I whipped up using Demos. All of the graphs have the same window. I want my students to get good at quickly identifying "parent graphs" so although this will be a "formative assessment" I will still time the quiz and score it but allow my students to do various versions of the worksheet to improve their scores as desired.

Click through to download this file as a PDF

If you open the file you will notice I have included two versions of the worksheet. They are subtly different. In class I will make sure that neighbors don't have the same version.

Radical Puzzle

If you search for "Trig Puzzle" in Google one of the first links is to this blog! Pretty neat since I don't update this enough, certainly not enough for my friend Rory. Anyhow, just before Christmas my PLC searched "Radical Puzzle" in Google a few times looking for a Tarsia style puzzle but couldn't find exactly what we wanted. Which was a Tarsia style puzzle that included simplifying radicals as well as basic radical operations (without variables). So we whipped one up that you can download as a PDF. Just click through the picture below.

Click through to download this as a PDF file.

The puzzle is a little tricky since there are problems on all 4 sides of the boxes, but the solution will read as expected. If you find the solution phrase too obnoxious you can always edit it in Acrobat. I haven't posted the solution anywhere to keep it off Google, although I know none of our students would ever search for such a thing.

You Are a Jeopardy Writer!

One of my teacher friends approached me a couple of weeks ago with a Jeopardy worksheet of mine I had apparently left around the photocopy machine. She wanted to know if she could use it in her classes, obviously yes. I figured I should post it here as well.

I have presented before about classroom review games and Jeopardy before, but this was a new worksheet I created to encourage kids to come up with their own (hopefully clever) categories and to begin thinking about their upcoming final exam.

Download PDF Download Pages File

It's not enough to just give kids this worksheet and expect them to come up with great categories, trust me. So in addition to handing out the worksheet I showed a few good Jeopardy clips (there are a ton on YouTube) and we worked together to brainstorm a few Jeopardy categories and sample questions together as a class.

One of my students Josh, traps Lobsters for a hobby, and hence became known as the Lobsterman, as you can imagine, I was pretty psyched when another student created a category called "Beware of the Logsterman" for his review. (I still, of course, received many, many mediocre categories, but this pre-work resulted in the overall submission quality going way up!)

Here is the final set of categories I used this year in Algebra2.

If you found this blog because of ISTE I'd love to hear from you! Let me know what else you'd like to see here!

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This is Water

My school's graduation is two weeks away and I'm at home trying to write a speech for the ceremony while remaining calm. This is tough. The last time I gave a grad speech I quoted a bit from David Foster Wallace's excellent This is Water Kenyon College commencement address. I will probably draw from Wallace again, the piece is timeless. In the very small cache of documents I saved to bring back from India to New Hampshire there is a worn copy of the entire thing. I've probably read it twenty times, still gets me.

It turns out that a few days ago some folks turned an large chunk of the speech into a video. Click through the picture to check it out.​ Really great.

Click through to watch the video version of This is Water. ​

Here is a link to the full speech.​

Crocodile Dentist

I get great review game ideas just browsing toy stores (and way way too many games). Crocodile Dentist was born this way. The game is sometimes hard to find, but seems to currently be available on Amazon.*

Gameplay is in groups, and nearly identical to Danger Cards, a review game I wrote about earlier. But in this one the croc is the star of the show, although the kids still do lots of math.

Set Up

You will need the crocodile (obviously) as well as the Keynote presentation I use for the classes. I also print out worksheets for each round. Below is also the link to the Pages worksheet set I made for the lesson I ran this week. Most of the problems are snapped from Sullivan's Algebra with Trigonometry book.

Download Keynote
Download Pages WS

Game Play

Here are the rules straight from the presentation that I share with the kids, I've added a bit of extra explanation as well.

At this point I jump immediately into the math by having the students work through the first page of questions. Teams hand in their worksheets as soon as they are done. Once most of the teams have handed in their sheets I cajole the final team into turning in theirs. During this part of the game I usually wander around the room making sure everyone is participating.

Once all the sheets are turned in I score them really fast and we discuss any questions that seemed universally unclear. I remind the kids before the game begins that this is primarily about review. Each team gets points for each right answer. The team with the most points goes first in the Croc Round and then play continues clockwise from group to group. (I've tried other turn systems but this seems to be the easiest for me to not mess up during the game.)

The Dentist Round works exactly as described on this slide. This is always intense because the winner of the round will nearly always be suspenseful, although the teams who were successful on the problems will have an advantage. To keep everything moving I usually only let one kid at a time come up to the table where the croc is.

The bonus round immediately follows the dentist round. The winning team plays for candy.

The round is nearly always a blast, because over and over again kids will take "one too many trips to the well" and not get any candy! It's hilarious. Further, if they manage to push four teeth successfully I usually start offering them deals encouraging them to press their luck (and get eaten) good times.

And that's it. Once the candy round is done we jump into round 2 and repeat. If you want you can keep score and have a grand champion at the end, I sometimes do this but it's not really needed. At the end of class I direct students to a Google Doc where they can access all the problems and solutions for additional review. This review game is a blast. If you give it a shot in your classroom let me know how it goes.

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Links to Amazon.com are affiliate links when reasonable.

Danger Cards Remix

The other day my seniors, who are reviewing for their IB exam, wanted to play the Danger Cards game for a review session. I told them they if they made it, we could play it. Here is what I did.

I quickly reformatted my Keynote slideshow to a Google Doc Presentation. The Danger Cards presentation is not fancy or anything anyway so nothing was really lost in the transition. I retitled the question slides with student's names and added blank answer slides after each question slide. Each student was responsible for creating one question slide and completing the subsequent answer slide. At this point I shared the Google Presentation with everyone in class giving everybody edit rights.

I told students that the slide deck needed to be finished by the night before we were going to play the game in class so that I would have time to choose the final set of questions we would use. They were also on the honor system not to cheat and study the questions (or more importantly the answers) their peers had written.

Although the questions the students came up with were not in any way earth shattering, and the formatting of the slides was not as beautiful as it could have been, for a lesson developed in less time than I have spent writing this post about it, it was definitely a success. Students also had a solid bank of questions and answers (including many we did not get to use in class) that they could use for additional review.

Here is a link to a Google Presentations version of Danger Cards you can make a copy of and use with your classes if you want to try this activity out. Check out the original Danger Cards post for more details about the game.

Scaffolding Trig Graphs - Desmos Kong

Yesterday evening, way too late to be planning a new lesson I was noodling through Sam Shah's filing cabinet looking for something that would allow students to practice trig functions, ideally kind of game like. There is good stuff there, like this graphic organizer from Mimi, but nothing like what I was looking for. For years, here and there, I have heard people mention the graphing game Green Gobs but I have never actually used it myself. Still, downloading software for all of my students to use (that had to be purchased) was going to be out of the question, at least last night. Maybe I could make something similar with Desmos. I have been using Desmos more and more with the kids and loving it. A little while later I came up with Trig Scaffolding.

Anyway, let's get into it. The activity (1) I created is called Trig Scafolding: How High Can You Get? The entire thing is built into one Desmos worksheet. I demoed the activity for my students on the big screen and then shared the link.

I think this is all best explained with screen shots:

When students open up the Desmos Link they see the points of the function they are trying to graph.

Students know they are right if their graph matches up with the points.

The kids can «climb up» to the next graph by turning off the graphs they were working on and turning on the next ones.

I added notes along the way in Desmos to mark students progress and remind them about Desmos's excellent features like the easy integration of sliders. I spent the entire activity circulating and working with pairs of students. I was impressed with the total engagement the kids had through the block and the different strategies they were using to figure out the graphs.

No one picked up on the very thin Donkey Kong theme, but overall the activity worked really well. A couple groups did engage in some mindless guessing and checking, but most of the kids were really trying to reason out the functions with Desmos along with pencil and paper or whiteboards. Although I didn't do so, it would be easy for students to turn in their «solutions» for this assignment by having them save their graph and sharing the link with you.

I was really unsure how difficult kids were going to find this when I created it, but the scaffolding of the problems seemed to be decent. It is easy enough to adjust anyhow. I think in the next iteration I will add more problems where I place restrictions on the graph, either to make the problems more challenging, or increase the level of scaffolding.

Have you tried anything like this with Desmos? I would love to see it and hear about it!

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(1) I called it a game with my first class yesterday and the kids kept comparing it to other games like Danger Cards, I called it an activity in the other classes and there was none of this nonsense. In fact in the other classes the kids told me that it was «a good game!»

Save Kelly!

Rory, who has taken this activity and sprinted with it, has been hounding me to write a post about its creation.

(1)

At my last school with the encouragement of my colleagues I picked up the physics classes when the physics teacher retired. My first year I did a lot of lousy book labs although I did manage to do the mousetrap car thing. I knew that moving forward I wanted to add more engaging activities for each topic we examined.

The Save Kelly activity was the result of my sister coming home from college and telling me about some fun stuff she had been doing at college in her engineering program and how maybe we could turn one of the activities into a lesson connecting to Newton's Laws that my students had been studying.

The activity works like this. First students are told the ridiculous back story. That is, they are out hiking with their friend Kelly (2) when suddenly Kelly is abducted by a vicious Pterodactyl and dropped on the other side of an expansive ravine. The students of course must save their friend. All the students have to save their friend is a survival kit, and some pennies. Everyone knows Pterodactyl's can be taken down with pennies right? What follows is from the worksheet I gave the students

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Save Kelly!

As you are painfully aware your dear friend Kelly is being held by a vicious pterodactyl across the ravine. You gather your wits and take in the surroundings, first you pull out your survival kit and then you also notice two threads stretching across the pit. You figure that if you can transport pennies to Kelly, they can be used to do away with the pterodactyl.

Instructions:

Your group must use only the materials provided by the survival kit to design a system to transport as many pennies as possible using the twine. You may not use any tools (scissors, knives, etc) only what is in the survival kit, plus one meter of masking tape.

You may design your structure any way you want. With a couple of rules:

1. Your contraption must start from rest at the designated spot. Once your contraption is set into motion it may not be touched again.
2. The masking tape must not touch the pennies.

If you find you are running low on supplies you may barter with other teams. You are allowed to run trials, but take care not to squander your survival kit.

The Competition:

15 minutes before the end of the block two official trials will be performed; your rank amongst teams will be based on your best trial. Your score will be determined by the distance your contraption travels in floor squares, multiplied by the number of pennies you transport the entire distance.

The Write Up:

This activity will be written up as a lab report in your lab notebook.

Your write up must include the following components:

• the necessary pieces of a standard discussion (reread your lab reports guidelines page)
• sketches of your groups’ final design
• a clear connection between the activity and each of Newton’s 3 laws as well as any other pertinent physics topics.
• the results of the activity and how your team worked together to overcome challenges.

You have some options for the format of your lab write up:

For a maximum grade of a good solid B you can turn in a traditional lab report with only the discussion section (and of course the title, page numbers, table of contents, etc.)

For a maximum grade of an A you can turn in an alternative lab report. This written piece could take the form of a news article, a narrative (perhaps from the pterodactyl’s point of view), a journal entry, or something else.

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The write up's for this activity were always awesome. A million times more enjoyable to read than 60+ (nearly identical) dreary lab reports. Here is a picture of one I saved.

Overall, it's a pretty good activity, if you are teaching physics definitely give it a shot with your students.

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(1) The survival kit basically contained what me and my sister found on a romp through the grocery store, with with some candy and red herrings like penne pasta, manicotti, and marshmallows. It also included a straw and some balloons. Rory put rubber bands in her survival kit as well, but I didn't use to. To make the bags I fed them though my inkjet, which although was probably a dumb idea for the printer, made for some awesome props. Props are huge.
(2) The first year I did this I had a student named Kelly. In future years I always implied Kelly was Kelly Clarkson. Which meant I could play «Since You've Been Gone» over and over again throughout the entire lab. Good times.