This activity went way better than I thought it would. This summer I paged through my textbooks accompanying resources and found an activity suggesting using soup cans, centimeter cubes, water, and rulers to introduce slope-intercept form. My initial reaction was "you're kidding right?". It seemed like a good activity but giving groups of freshman open containers of water sounded like an invitation to several very wet students and multiple detentions. I filed it away, just in case, with no real intention of coming back to it.
After a little over a semester of intentionally including multiple experiments every chapter, I wasn't nearly as intimidated when this file stared back at me from my chapter outline last week. I printed out the book's worksheet, gathered some resources for the next day and went home. The morning of, I decided to rework the task a bit (a have both the original and my file at the end of this post).
The students did swimmingly. Every student was on task for most of the period. The class did well seeing the relationships between the initial height of the water and the y-intercept as well as between the number of cubes added and the rate of change.
After a little over a semester of intentionally including multiple experiments every chapter, I wasn't nearly as intimidated when this file stared back at me from my chapter outline last week. I printed out the book's worksheet, gathered some resources for the next day and went home. The morning of, I decided to rework the task a bit (a have both the original and my file at the end of this post).
The students did swimmingly. Every student was on task for most of the period. The class did well seeing the relationships between the initial height of the water and the y-intercept as well as between the number of cubes added and the rate of change.
When I do this again next year, I'm going to gather some different containers beforehand. Glass worked better than metal containers because the water level was much easier to read. So, I think I'll use some salsa jars, big fat canning jars, and some of the baby food jars from my house (maybe even the plastic Gerber ones will work). Goodness knows I've got enough of those laying around.
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This is my counter after class. The science teacher was so proud of me.
| My version (also shown below) 
| The original. 
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