People have asked why they can’t add questions to these links. The only place you can ask questions (or skip them, if you’re bored) is on the homepage where they’re stripped of the author’s name, the author’s questions, and everyone else’s questions, all of which have the potential to bias your response. You might disagree with that call but it was intentional, not an oversight.
- Big Marshmallow, Christopher Danielson. Five out of six questions (as of this writing) concern calories. Coincidence? What could have been? (PS. 100% perplexity as of this writing also. Strong work, Mister Vice President.)
- Bart Acceleration, Tim Erickson. The placement of the beam adds an interesting frame of reference to the video. I’d like to see the timer saved for later, of course.
- Big and Small Cookies, John Golden. The photo’s blurry and already cluttered up with abstraction but I do like the question a great deal, “Is it a better deal to buy the three smaller cookies or the larger one?” Because the area of a circle is a strange thing.
- Danish Clog, Fawn Nguyen. I wouldn’t find this nearly as perplexing without the sandal in the clog. A little bit of whimsy goes a long way with me.
- Wheat and Chessboard, Carl Malartre. This is a task I’ve only ever seen posed verbally. The visual, for me, illustrates the fact that, my word, square 64 is going to have a ton of wheat on it.
Plus my own listings this week, which include some older material:
- Gears Ad Infinitum
- Bike Chain Recycler
- Short Yellow Lights
- Big Baby
- Bubble Gum Truck
- Equilateralness
- CD Burner
- Boat in the River
Let me run an idea by you: once we get these things tagged up by standard or objective or keyword or whatever, then you have ready-made gallery problem sets. ie. Rather than inflicting my own fascination with absurd gummi bears on a kid who doesn’t care about them, I can send her over to 101questions and she can pick out a problem that interests her and use it to demonstrate competence. Student-centered paradise? Logistical nightmare? Both?
14 Comments
jsb16
May 5, 2012 - 9:01 am -Awesome idea. I wants it now, Precious.
David Cox
May 5, 2012 - 9:09 am -Logistical problem from your end or the teacher’s?
I think this has some potential but there may be some issues with tagging. Would crowd sourcing the tags be an option? (ie. You may upload a question with a specific topic/standard in mind and I mind find another use for it or may find standards are incorrectly tagged, etc.)
Will Act 2 information be available? My guess is that there is a small percentage of Act 1s that actually have a fully formed lesson behind them. If Act 2 is available, will student have access or should that be left to the teacher to provide as part of the conversation that takes place as the student seeks a solution?
Can the Act 1 question alone serve as a prompt for a student investigation in that she recreates the question or at least has to research in order to find the Act 2 information? This may make Act 2 unnecessary in some cases and the problem becomes a project.
How do you see it playing out?
Steve Phelps
May 5, 2012 - 9:55 am -or a place where students could upload their own pics, instead of choosing one uploaded by a “teacher?”
mathcurmudgeon
May 5, 2012 - 10:14 am -I like the idea of tagging and being able to browse gallery sets.
If possible, I’d like to be able to edit things after posting, or perhaps an extra field that is displayed after posting a question: what are some of the possible answers or to make the picture’s context a little clearer.
Take my entry 435-pearl-river-crossover-bridge, for example. I would have liked to have been able to put in some information about the purpose of the bridge and answer some of the questions that were raised. In this case, it was to connect two countries that drove on different sides of the road. Drivers in HongKong (left side) could easily switch over to the right side of the road to drive in China.
Just a thought.
Nathan Kraft
May 5, 2012 - 12:08 pm -Dan,
I really like your idea because there are a ton of videos and pictures that all hit the same topic. For instance, the marshmallow problem is really not that much different than the gummy bear problem. But maybe the marshmallow problem is too easy for one student and they’d like something more challenging. (This reminds me of tiered assignments.)
andrew
May 5, 2012 - 4:16 pm -Would work great in a time-flexible middle school classroom, except:
“AGREE NOT TO … use 101qs if you are under the age of thirteen (13) years old;”
Stupid COPPA.
Rob
May 6, 2012 - 11:02 am -The chessboard is done beautifully at http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/inspirations_htm/movie_a.htm
or
http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/inspirations_htm/maths_index.htm
If you haven’t seen the video, be sure to watch it.
Bob Lochel
May 6, 2012 - 1:34 pm -I feel that tagging may be a good start. It’s a tricky thing…we don’t want to put kids into a positions where we are suggesting too much about these pictures, but there are certainly some natural categories for many of the pictures.
For example, I recently worked with a geometry teacher, where her students had to seek a picture which interested them. It would be nice to have a geometry tag to allow kids to just cycle through pictures with a geometry slant. A number of my posts fit into the prob/stat category.
Flora
May 6, 2012 - 1:53 pm -Sounds like a great idea. Teachers could use it to search too.
Daniel Schaben
May 6, 2012 - 6:58 pm -The Wheat and Chess board problem – An interesting question. How many bushels of wheat must we purchase to cover the board?
Daniel Schaben
May 7, 2012 - 4:22 am -How many semi-loads is that? Does the United States Produce enough grain to cover the board? These last two questions I ask after their is reasonable answer?
Dan Meyer
May 7, 2012 - 10:16 pm -David:
I guess I’m just wondering if more than a couple hundred teachers in the US would be willing to give students that kind of latitude in self-selecting an assignment. (The teacher should probably give students feedback, let’s not forget, on each of those different problems.)
One of my goals for 101qs.com is to have a platform that makes it easy for me to create these kinds of pages, which at the moment I create by hand, with a lot of time and irritation. I’m just another user on the site, though, so if I can upload that material so can any other user, which is great, though I’m guessing uploading and downloading act two and three will have to be a premium feature, limited to users who have paid some kind of community membership dues.
Ryan
May 11, 2012 - 7:14 am -Dan:
“One of my goals for 101qs.com is to have a platform that makes it easy for me to create these kinds of pages, which at the moment I create by hand, with a lot of time and irritation.”
-Maybe there’s a way for each user who uploads content to 101qs to contribute to the 2nd and 3rd Act material, particularly if they are pulling from lessons they’ve already delivered to students. That way we’re churning these out as a community rather than putting the burden on one, or a few, individuals. Your 3 Acts pages have an crisp aesthetic quality that I really appreciate – would opening up to workload to many users be a case of “too many cooks?” Then perhaps there’s a second site (101 answers) with a catalog of 2nd act material or links to websites that have answers, etc.
“I’m guessing uploading and downloading act two and three will have to be a premium feature, limited to users who have paid some kind of community membership dues.”
-I’ll pay it!
Denis Roarty
May 12, 2012 - 10:41 am -I would like to think there are groups on track to build the infrastructure talked about here. Starting with open source publication, a community of people (perhaps paying membership fees as suggested above to maintain the thing), a variety of templates to create content (including a few three acts templates), a platform to review, tag, annotate, branch off and improve/repurpose the original content, a platform to drop in a class list and assign content to students, perhaps a place for some analytics and reflection that uses student work to improve the content… etc…
If anyone knows of such a place or would be interested in having it built out, I would love to know. droarty@yahoo.com