Very good critique of the project! Good, thoughtful analysis that offers good improvement ideas.
Note: Kepler -- 3D fractals ? (I’d be interested to hear more about this!)
Geomag: neat!
I like your good suggestions for modifications of the project. Good work! (Now I’d like to try the project again incorporating your modifications.) Excellent idea to connect this with the surface area unit.
New project: Indoor ski hill (!) (what an astounding concept, an indoor ski hill…) I like the constraints you’ve given, which forces some mathematical thinking. Question about slope: are ski hill slopes determined like the slope of a line on a graph, or are they expressed as percentages?
Unfortunately, I could not access your powerpoint from any of your blogs - -I'm not sure why. Nonetheless, I've see the powerpoint already and know that it was good.
Your write-up of the indoor ski hill project is good in many ways. You address the PLOs included, give a good rubric for assessment, and break the project down into its components to help kids make sense of it.
However, I have some caveats about presenting the project in the way you've done here:
•The "warm-up" is a good idea, but if you turn it into a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet, kids will simply treat the project as a worksheet, and refuse to engage in the topic in any meaningful way. We math teachers sometimes have a tendency to pre-digest the thinking a little too much, and to give kids work that offers very little space for them to bring their own thinking and original ideas. If this project is simply an exercise for them to drill the "find the slope" algorithm, they will do that, and not think about ski hills or polyhedra! Beware if doing too much of the work for the kids ahead of time.
•The extension ideas are good, but making them optional means that, really, no one is likely to do them. Again, it seems to me that you might be preempting students' original thinking by presenting them pre-made extensions before they've even begun thinking about the topic, and then making them optional means that there's no need to engage with these thoughts whatsoever! Better to bring up extension ideas as they arise, and as kids get well into grappling with the main problem. Don't tell kids "you don't really have to think about this", because then they won't!
•Are your stats for constraining the ski hill design really realistic? Are real ski runs no more than 100 ft. high and 300 ft. long? (I very much doubt if that's true for Whistler, for example...) And why give these constraints at all in the first place? Again, I feel the heavy hand of the teacher doing all the pre-thinking and predigesting of ideas. Why can't the kids figure out/ research the length and height of a good ski hill -- and do the same for a ski hill located inside a mall?
•And finally -- what is the relationship between ski hills and polygons/ polyhedra?
Mark for this part of the project write-up: Adequate --> Very Good Overall mark for the assignment: Very Good!
Susan's comments on your project presentation:
ReplyDeleteDeb, Zsofia and Nadine: Polyhedra project
Beautiful and varied polyhedral models!
Very good critique of the project! Good, thoughtful analysis that offers good improvement ideas.
Note: Kepler -- 3D fractals ? (I’d be interested to hear more about this!)
Geomag: neat!
I like your good suggestions for modifications of the project. Good work! (Now I’d like to try the project again incorporating your modifications.) Excellent idea to connect this with the surface area unit.
New project: Indoor ski hill (!) (what an astounding concept, an indoor ski hill…)
I like the constraints you’ve given, which forces some mathematical thinking. Question about slope: are ski hill slopes determined like the slope of a line on a graph, or are they expressed as percentages?
Good rubric.
Excellent!
Susan's comments on your project write-up:
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I could not access your powerpoint from any of your blogs - -I'm not sure why. Nonetheless, I've see the powerpoint already and know that it was good.
Your write-up of the indoor ski hill project is good in many ways. You address the PLOs included, give a good rubric for assessment, and break the project down into its components to help kids make sense of it.
However, I have some caveats about presenting the project in the way you've done here:
•The "warm-up" is a good idea, but if you turn it into a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet, kids will simply treat the project as a worksheet, and refuse to engage in the topic in any meaningful way. We math teachers sometimes have a tendency to pre-digest the thinking a little too much, and to give kids work that offers very little space for them to bring their own thinking and original ideas. If this project is simply an exercise for them to drill the "find the slope" algorithm, they will do that, and not think about ski hills or polyhedra! Beware if doing too much of the work for the kids ahead of time.
•The extension ideas are good, but making them optional means that, really, no one is likely to do them. Again, it seems to me that you might be preempting students' original thinking by presenting them pre-made extensions before they've even begun thinking about the topic, and then making them optional means that there's no need to engage with these thoughts whatsoever! Better to bring up extension ideas as they arise, and as kids get well into grappling with the main problem. Don't tell kids "you don't really have to think about this", because then they won't!
ReplyDelete•Are your stats for constraining the ski hill design really realistic? Are real ski runs no more than 100 ft. high and 300 ft. long? (I very much doubt if that's true for Whistler, for example...) And why give these constraints at all in the first place? Again, I feel the heavy hand of the teacher doing all the pre-thinking and predigesting of ideas. Why can't the kids figure out/ research the length and height of a good ski hill -- and do the same for a ski hill located inside a mall?
•And finally -- what is the relationship between ski hills and polygons/ polyhedra?
Mark for this part of the project write-up: Adequate --> Very Good
Overall mark for the assignment: Very Good!