Unit Projects
Students select items from a catalog and fill out an order form, calculating shipping, tax, and discounts.
Students analyze and interpret a data set.
Students investigate the pattern of bounces for a pool ball as it makes its way around pool tables of various dimensions. As you might expect, ratio and scaling are involved in this Project. For a pool table with given dimensions students predict the number of times the ball “hits” the sides of the table and which of the four pockets it will fall.
Students collect data about the rate at which a leaking faucet loses water. Students make predictions based on their data.
Students investigate how the drop height of a ball is related to the bounce height. Students make predictions based on their data.
Students use cubes to simulate the radioactive decay of a substance and estimate its half-life. They then create a new situation involving radioactive decay and design and carry out their own simulation.
Students use digital Cuisenaire rods and find the surface areas of stacks of rods of certain lengths by varying the number of rods n. They describe a pattern and find the relationship between the number of rods n and the surface area of the stack A. The equation for the surface area is a linear relationship in terms of the number of rods used. Students will find that different but equivalent expressions can be used to model the data. You could include questions about volume by asking how many unit rods will be needed to build a stack of n rods of length x. Then ask the students to determine the function that can model this situation.