QUESTION: Making Systems of Equations POP?

[Ryan Goble]

Good Morning MC POP People!

I woke up today and received the following note from one of the STEM coaches I collaborate with in my district.

"[I'm meeting with my department head] today to start brainstorming ways to teach Systems of Equations in a nontraditional way. Any ideas???

So here's was my response. I would love to hear what additional ideas you might have for this coach.

Soooooo project-based systems of equations:

To start D/Y Dan (Math Ed @ Stanford) has a fun blog post about this very issue - the comments on it will give you a lot to think about…
(One Of Many Reasons) Why Students Hate Algebra

I don’t know how fancy your equations get in said systems - but a quick search led me to believe that you could do all kinds of fun sports stat analysis built around making assessments / projections of teams.

So here is a “meh” articulation of a football-based SOE unit (download the PDFs)
Fantasy Football

I would go with college hoops since you’re coming up on March. But you could find out if kids would dig NFL or NBA more by a simple survey. I know that KenPom are the stats / data for college hoops that all the sports heads use to graph - well everything - see http://kenpom.com

From there I’m not a SUPER sports fan but do follow my Wolverine blogs - to those ends, you can see how the math geeks there tell stories with different systems. Two sample blogs:

Sharing the ball leads to balanced, efficient Michigan offense

Brief Statistical Review Of The Non-Conference Basketball Schedule

Obviously, those are too intense but again - as a model to scale down - there might be something there.

Then you have two blogs about people doing Project-Based SOE work. Of particular interest is the Team Project JPEG at the bottom of the second blog. I think they have some great initial scaffolding for a project that could be a bit cooler but I love that they have a lot of choice.

Systems of Equations Project - Sparking Interest

Engaging students: Solving linear systems of equations by either su...

Let me know what is helpful here - hopefully the other coaches will also have some ideas.

Good Luck,

Ryan

I was also wondering if there might be environmental themed things students could do - like something around this video like this and bottled water usage? I dunno

Any cooler ideas MC POP people?