So I wrote this post yesterday, and today we tried it out.
The purpose was to give students an opportunity to notice the subtleties in the language associated with three different mathematical scenarios they may need to represent.
We read each scenario out loud and then asked the students to compare and contrast each problem type with their table partner.
Some students began by discussing the similarities and differences of the contexts…
Others began by making a list of what they noticed on the back…You can see that this student paid attention to more of the mathy parts~understanding what was meant by a one-variable versus a two variable equation.
And then you’ll see below where students were able to make sense of each scenario and the math required. However, the first student used an equation in two variables for the first scenario and created a table to find the solution.
We didn’t get to the whole class conversation part of this lesson…I want to talk about each problem type and how to recognize the differences. Notice that two of the students above wrote the equation for the two variable scenario, but the third student created a table. I think we need to talk about why that is. Also, I think I may want to do three more scenarios that would produce equations in standard form, to see if they would recognize the differences then.
I definitely think that this was a useful exercise and would do it again.
One little shout out…one student pulled out their phone because they wanted to check out the equations for the third scenario on their Desmos app!!!