Learning Activities: Week 4

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“When are we ever going to use this in life?”: One of the most common questions students like to throw at their math teachers.  It is very important to not just teach students math concepts, but to show them how it is applicable in their everyday life.  Show them that math is everywhere.  When students are able to see how a mathematic concept can be applied to the real world, it not only helps them better understand the concept, but it also makes math more interesting and fun.

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One of the lessons that we had this week in Teaching Mathematics I/S was very application based.  With the use of three application problems, students were introduced to the concept of exponential functions.  Each student received a handout that had sections for each of the three stations.  The sheet had empty tables of values and graphs on it to lead students through the activities, as well as extension and reflection questions.  At each of the three stations, there was an application problem and some type of manipulative to help students with the problem.  An example of one of the stations was the “Ice Bucket Challenge” station.  Students were given counters to help them visualize how many people were nominated to do the ice bucket challenge each day (assuming that each person nominates three people after they complete the challenge).  Students could fill out the table of values through the help of the counters, and then create a graph representing the day number versus the number of nominations on that day.  Students could try to find a pattern because they were then asked how many people were nominated on the eleventh day (that would be a lot of counters!).

I really enjoyed this activity and will use it in my future classroom.  There are multiple different aspects of this lesson that I believe were very beneficial.  First of all, like mentioned in the introduction of this blog post, it is very important to relate mathematics to the real world.  All three of the stations in this activity involved some sort of application problem for students to solve.  Including application problems allows students to better understand the material, rather than just memorize the information and erase it from their brain the second it is no longer needed.  Relating to something that students understand and enjoy, such as the ice bucket challenge, increases students conceptual understanding as opposed to just their procedural understanding.  Another thing I think was very beneficial about this lesson was the use of manipulatives.  Two of the three stations had counters for students to visualize the exponential growth of the application.  This helps students who are visual learners.  The third station involved how many sections are created when folding a piece of paper multiple times.  This station had a stack of paper for students to use while solving the problem.  Again, this is beneficial for visual and tactile learners to help with their understanding.  A final thing I liked about this activity was the kinesthetic aspect of it.  Each station was set up at a different table in the room and students had to move to each of the stations in order to solve the problem.  I think this was an excellent idea, as opposed to simply giving students the tools to solve all three problems at their own desk.  Allowing students to get up and move around during the lesson not only makes the activity more fun and exciting, it also can be very beneficial for kinesthetic learners.

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The only thing I would slightly alter about this activity is some of the wording on the worksheet.  For example, when I first started at Zombie Apocalypse station, I thought that the numbers we were suppose to fill out were the total number of zombies, as opposed to the number of zombies that were infected that day.  Although this is specified on the main sheet at the station, the wording in the table of values on our individual worksheets had me slightly confused at first, until it was clarified by the teacher.  However, this was a very small thing that, once clarified, did not at all impact the great outcome of the activity.  I would definitely use this lesson activity to introduce exponential functions to my future math class.