Function Carnival

I haven’t been doing a good job posting this year. Something awesome happens in class and I think, “I have to write that up.” Then I get home, and start planning the next few lessons, and I forget all about the awesomeness. It’s been a busy year.

This morning, on CBS Sunday Morning, I learned about a truly extraordinary man, Jim O’Connor, a high school math teacher who volunteers his time at the local Children’s Hospital. What made me sad, though, was his comment, “It drives me crazy when people say that school should be fun. I mean it’s nice if it could be, but you can’t make school fun.” Watch the video. Mr O’Connor really is an amazing man. I just think that it might be time for him to retire from teaching.

I mean, if learning math can’t be fun, then why should anyone consider doing it? Kids and their parents already think that learning math is a drag, so shouldn’t we math teachers be working hard to change that thinking, not perpetuate it?

I’d like to think that my students have had fun learning this year. From dissecting chocolate chip cookies to writing graphing stories to rolling balls down ramps, they’ve collected and analyzed data and created function models. They’ve studied some statistics and some functions (linear and non-linear) and now we’re working on right triangle trigonometry. With 9th graders. I’ve worked hard to make learning fun and challenging.

Thankfully, others are also working hard to make school mathematics not only interesting and fun, but helpful for us teachers to diagnose student difficulties. Take the Function Carnival currently under development by Christopher Danielson, Dan Meyer, and Desmos. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it over there at Desmos, but these little animations will tell me more about what my students understand about functions than anything I could have come up with. And the beautiful thing is that they’re engaging for physics, too. That’s awesome for me and my students because at Baxter Academy, my 9th graders are also learning physics. Imagine my glee at learning about this interesting new tool. I will definitely have them exploring (in a few weeks) and sharing the results with my physics teacher colleagues.

In response to suggestions from the many commenters to Dan’s post, the Desmos team got busy creating more scenarios, including graphing velocity vs. time along with height vs. time. I’m looking forward to these new situations being included in the current Function Carnival site. Maybe they’ll be ready when I need them in a few weeks. It will also be fun to have my students attempt these graphs before we go off to Physics Fun Day in May.

Here are a few more challenges in development:

• Cannonball Man (v vs t)
• Bumper Cars (v vs t)
• Roller Coaster (h vs t)
• Roller Coaster (v vs t)
• Zipper (h vs t)

Try them out. Give feedback. Encourage your students to have fun while they learn.