Skip to main content

Trig Project Idea....suggestions?

Inspired by @krisreid72 sharing this document with @Fouss, combined with the fact that I was looking for something that my trig students (who just finished a unit on solving triangles using Law of Sines/Law of Cosines) could wrestle with while I am out of the classroom Monday and Tuesday, I came up with an idea.

The Amazing Race!
random caveat: Season 14 had a deaf participant!

I will give students 2 options -

Option 1: No real trig involved, but still challenging thought processes and more stops to make
  • Find the shortest "round-the-world" trip visiting many of the tallest buildings in the world.
    • Assume (for the current purposes of this project) that you have a private jet/helicopter that can take off/land anywhere in the world.
  • Primary tool: Google maps
Option 2: (taken from @krisreid72's project) Significant amount of trig involved, along with challenging thought processes
  • Find the quickest and safest path from the Golden Triangle to the finish line at the Mabu-mabu tribe
  • Primary tools
    • Paper map of possible trails
    • Rules/directions/important information (see page 2 of this document)
    • Law of Sines/Law of Cosines/general trig knowledge

I'm really excited about this! I was so proud of my students after their Triangle test, because they struggled through some tough problems and tried to make sense of them.  I think this will be a good opportunity to challenge their thinking skills even further and give them some freedom.  I wish I could have more trig involved in Option 1, but I'm not sure how to do it naturally.

Thoughts?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Professional Goals

On my way to an evaluation team meeting today (I want to write more about that...but don't feel I can confidentially...one bad thing about being myself online and not having a blog pseudonym), I had a bit of a heart to heart with my boss (principal). You might think, "on the way" isn't very long...but picture 100+ outdoor stairs from the school building to the admin building where the meeting was being held...lol. Anyway, he was asking me how things were going, if I could believe that the year is already almost halfway over, and how time has flown in the 1.5ish years I've been in VA. He also mentioned that I have 30 more years to go before retiring. After that comment, he asked about my professional goals: When you're getting ready to retire, what do you hope to have accomplished/done? At first, I didn't know how to respond. I'm not much for long-term planning. I'm lucky to know and have decided that I indeed will be staying in VA for at leas...

Reflections and Preparation: A Look Into the Socio-Emotional Learning Goals of a Teacher

* taps mic * Is this on?  I haven't been here in years , but there is so much that I have been reading, thinking about, and planning in the past few days.  I needed to get some of it out.  Maybe this will forever live in drafts, or maybe, just maybe, I'll be brave and #pushsend. I crawled out from under a rock and started using TweetDeck on my computer last week.  For years I have missed the #MTBoS community, but have felt that it was too overwhelming to keep up with on top of all the typical day to day activities.  Also, I joined Twitter back when I was one of two math teachers at my school.  That community was my lifeline during my first 3 years of teaching.  Now, I have a workroom filled with teachers in real life with whom I can and should collaborate.  The richness and depth of these workroom discussions are not usually the same as what I found online, but it is still critical to support and develop these relationships. Now comes to the r...

ASL/English Vocabulary in the Math Classroom

My last semester in college, while I was student teaching, I had a class that emphasized different key topics in the field of Deaf Education.  One such topic was vocabulary development.  We all already knew that students who are deaf/hard of hearing have a lower vocabulary than their same-age hearing peers for a variety of reasons not least of which being their limited access to "incidental learning" that comes from listening to other people's conversations/tv/radio, etc.  In our class, we talked about ways to introduce new vocabulary in order to give students a more connected understanding of the new word in its five distinct forms. Picture Description/definition ASL sign (if applicable) English word (in print) Fingerspelling of English word I try to be conscious of this as I teach.  It's very difficult sometimes, and many of the math terms to not have standard ASL signs, so it is more difficult for the students to attach meaning and use the new term through f...