re: “entries #7 and #43 from the WCYDWT taxonomy”

Is there actually a WCYDWT taxonomy? If not, when can we expect it?

:)

Bill

I love this one. Can’t wait to put it in front of my “advanced” kids and watch them implode. It’ll be borderline cruel, to be honest, because these kids are waaaay over-confident when it comes to calculations. I may have to get some video of the process.

Question though: At what point did you reveal the answer to your students? Or did they figure it out on their own?

Whoops, I must have been reading quickly through and not seen “every minor line represents one inch”. Careless. Thanks, Dan.

My immediate thought when I first watched the video was to recreate the scenario in my own room which has a drop ceiling. Once the students are set on their solution, we move the tile and find a bag of chocolates shaped like golden bars for the class to enjoy. I think I’d like to run the part Dan has outlined, so we have a good understanding and example, then start moving tiles around.

I see different complications to this mess.

Check the frame directly after the explosion: The explosive paint was on the ceiling of the room below, yet somehow cut the floor joints and made a perfectly square hole in the top room’s subfloor and finished floor? If you are truly going to blow a hole in the floor from below, the blast would spread far larger than what was shown by the time it made it through the space between the joists. Unless you used shaped charges, which this was not. I would think that this would also round off the corners, too. But who’s quibbling?

A much bigger problem for me is the idea of a typical four foot high safe, weighing some 600 pounds, filled with “millions of dollars in gold bricks” (at $500k per 27.5 pound brick/400ozTroy) meaning another couple hundred pounds AT LEAST. Let’s be generous and say 500kg total.

Suddenly eliminate the floors so there is nothing slowing that puppy down on a straight drop to the boathouse. Falling two floors and into the boat, total 8m maybe? This sumbitch is going to be MOVING with a holy pantload** of kinetic energy, something like 40kJ meaning 12.6m/s or about 30mph.

And that flimsy little frame on that dinky little speedboat is gonna stop it? Not hardly. And the boat isn’t gonna roll some or create a big ole wave splashing against the sides of the boathouse? And the safe was twisting before it dropped through the hole but somehow was straight and perfect after it dropped through the hole?

I’m bummed about the 1.6 inch error, too, but everything else just fries me.

** holy pantload is the technical term for “a lot”

It’s been a while since I watched the movie, but wasn’t the boat just a ruse? I recall the boat having a safe on it, but the actual safe falling under the house into the water, to be collected during the boat chase. If true, this should satisfy curmudgeon’s concerns a little.

Got it. “Garbage men in position.”

LOVE this! I teach science, and while I admire the lessons you facilitate, I struggle to use them in my class to teach science content.

This lesson is FABULOUS! After I read curmudgeon’s comments, I realized that in my physics class, my students could arrive at this conclusion and evaluate the plausibility of this scene..

Brilliant.

If I were a student in your class during this activity, I’d likely push back on your push back. Which is probably what you want.

I’d argue that many of these handheld measuring units actually have a function built in that effectively makes the decimal unit a base-12 unit to report the decimal as inches for each reference in the field.

If that’s the case here, then they did blow up the right spot.

Though curmudgeon’s points all apply whether they hit the right spot on the grid or not. Might want to get your science folks to tag team on this one.

Dan,
Thought you might like this bit of coincidental trivia. Seth Green’s father Herb is a math teacher/professor at Temple U.
-Ihor

Don’t pitchers throw 3.1 innings = 3 full innings, 1 out?

Silver
Are you sure that the scale doesn’t show the oz after the decimal? For example: could the weight register 9.15 to show 9 lb 15oz? When a pitcher enters a ball game it shows that he has thrown 45.2 innings so far this year. Everyone knows that the .2 means 2/3.

@morgante: I teach everything from algebra 1 to AP. My AP students are the most frequent culprits! I tend to think, actually, that it’s almost our own (us teachers’) fault, and I lump the science teachers in there. Story problems, labs, and real lfe applcations are just so mch easier in metric that we use it mch more often as we go higher. And if we’re in a program that teaches skills and nit thinking, then we’re training kids that “the number after the decimal is a count of the next-smaller measurement.”.

I teach AP Stats and we do a lot with Normal distributions of heights, so we start talking about the mean and the st dev and my kiddies get all garbled trying to flip between decimal notation and feet-inches notation. I was thinking about this with dan’s height of 6.6 feet and how that becomes 6 feet 6 inches–a very common type of statement among my advanced, college-bound, calculus-taking seniors. Usually my next comment on that is, “oh, so, six-and-a-half feet.” it’s usually “only” a minute or two before someone realizes that we just establshed that 6.6 equals 6.5 and we have to go back.

I love the idea of using popular culture inside the classroom. It definitely can get the job done with respect to having the students “buy in” to the fact that Math is a HUGE part of everyday life. I reference pop culture a lot in my lessons, For example, in Alg 1 I use Michael Jackson holding his baby out of a window to help teach slope ( Superman can fly straight up and save the baby but I have to RUN to the hotel and RISE in the elevator). One of the biggest pluses to these kinds of problems and references hasn’t been mentioned here yet. Not only do these ideas get the students interested but they also give everyone in the class a common reference point to fall back on. I am teaching Algebra 2 in summer school and one of my former students (Brian) is in my class. When another student had a misunderstanding about slope Brian spoke up and said “don’t you know the Superman and Michael Jackson story?” I haven’t taught Brian for two and a half years and he still remembered that stupid story and the lesson that went with it. Giving students the kind of experience you are talking about here with The Italian Job allows them to make a connection that will be remembered far longer than any lecture would.
Thank you for the great ideas.