I am going to extend the Minimal Spanning Trees lesson by having groups of 4 or 5 students come up with the best route to take for all of them using a car pool to get to and from their after school activities. Not only will they have to consider the shortest route but also time constraints.
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Minimal Spanning Tree
Great way to make it applicable to something kids have to do often or should do.
For the Unit 2 Challenge I would like to focus on Days 10-12, teaching binary. I am familiar with the lesson from PD, but there were a lot of possible resources and activities.
Keith,
Great - I love teaching this lesson. There is a real light bulb that goes off when kids finally understand the patterns and number sense. Once taught I always have a class tournament of the Cisco Binary game and post the high score for everyone to try to beat.
Brad
I worked on the Minimal Spanning tree lesson by having the students find the shortest walking route from school to their home in mileage.
I will have the students work on the minimal spanning tree lesson. We will find 10 places in our city to visit. They will create a map and chart out the shortest distance to each location.
Great idea to get the students applying the concept to something they can relate with. I’m sure if students had to walk the route, they would appreciate the skill.
I will work on Day 10-12: Binary
I will work on Day 10-12 Binary.
I am going to use the tower building activity. When I did it this summer I found it to be challenging. I think that my students will like it as well.
I have chose the lesson on binary
I will be working on Day 10-12: Binary Lesson Plan
@lawson_hamilton The extension activity has some great foresight into Unit 4 Programming. Do your students have experience with programming as they do this activity or are they new to programming?
I will be doing the sorting lesson days 15-16. My plan is to create extensions that tie the process of sorting with scientific classification.
Changed my mind.
I will be doing the Binary Lesson. It is a topic I have taught before in a math class and one that my students seem to struggle with at first.
I plan on using the dot cards and have the students use them to create the numbers I show on the board. I will also show them binary numbers ( with the dots and have them determine the base 10 equivalent).
As the lesson progresses, I will have the students use the binary numbers 1 - 26 and relate them to the alphabet (1 = A, 2 = B) and so on.
Then, in pairs, they will write coded messages.
Phillip
Phillip,
How’d it go? I love teaching the binary lessons because student come and understand it from so many different angles, based on their level of comfort with math. I’ve also seen students get the pattern, then relate it to the math and have more confidence going forward in that class!
Brad
I chose the Day 10-12 Binary Lesson. I chose it because it was a little difficult for me to explain–at least I thought it was. Despite my reservations, the way this lesson was set up, my kids responded much better than I did. They mastered the concept very quickly.
Great to hear that the lesson went well and your students mastered Binary fairly quickly. I know doing fun activities to help students grasp the concept can take a lot of time to plan and prepare.
I will be working on the Day 7-9 Cornrow curves lesson