BCAMT Conference 2011

Here’s the list of puzzles & games from my session at the BCAMT Fall Conference.

Together, we brainstormed some ideas about connecting games to mathematics. I listed some of these ideas in an earlier post.

Also, I attended a couple of sessions in the morning…

“It’s the most interesting thing a graphing calculator can do and we don’t even have kids do it.” Dan Kamin was talking about creating a scatterplot to determine the linear, quadratic, or exponential regression equation. While lines/curves of best fit are no longer in the curriculum (regression functions were in Applications of Math 10 & 11), it is expected that students will solve problems by analyzing linear, quadratic, and exponential functions. This provides opportunities to have students use technology to answer questions such as:

• Is the data best modeled with a line or with a curve?
• What is the equation of the function that best models the data?
• How does your best fit line/curve compare with the those used by experts?

As a person inhales and exhales, the volume of air in the lungs can be modeled with a periodic function. Dan asked his students to write the equation of the sinusoidal function. They couldn’t. It wasn’t a Ferris wheel. “No one had asked them to create something before.”

I’ve had difficulty making domain and range relevant to 15-year-olds. David Wees shared an interesting activity at his presentation. Have students draw a picture of an object using line segments. Then, for each line segment, have them write the equation and determine the domain and range. Finally, have them enter this information using GeoGebra and compare the result with the drawing.

A reminder… the 2012 BCAMT New Teachers’ Conference will be held on February 11 at Queen Elizabeth Secondary School in Surrey.