Please enjoy two posts from two teachers who are playing around with the Three-Act task structure.

First, John Rowe shows his students this image as a lead-in to counting problems, asking them, “Which state has more registered vehicles and how do you know?”

(Here’s an alternate version of that image that allows students to wonder “Where do you think these license plates are from and how do you know?” Because you can always add, but you can’t subtract.)

Second, Jenn Vadnais creates a stop-motion animation that does exactly what it wants to do, which is compose a cylinder into a sphere and then decompose the sphere into doughy little cubes. How close will math take you to the actual answer?

Go check out their posts, and keep up the great work, everybody.