Month: January 2017

Total 3 Posts

[Pseudocontext Saturdays] Tornado!

This Week’s Installment

Poll

What mathematical skill is the textbook trying to teach with this image?

[poll id=”11″]

(If you’re reading via email or RSS, you’ll need to click through to vote. Also, you’ll need to check that link tomorrow for the answer.)

Current Scoreboard

Team Me: 5
Team Commenters: 4

Pseudocontext Submissions

William Carey has offered two additional genres of pseudocontext that are worth your attention:

First:

One motif in pseudocontextual questions seems to be treating as a variable things that, you know, don’t vary.

Second:

The car question follows a fascinating pattern that shows up in lots of physicsy work: it begs the question. Physicists like to measure things. Sometimes measuring something directly is tricky (or impossible), so we measure other things, and then calculate the thing we actually want.

Questions like that have as their givens the thing we can’t measure and ask us to calculate the thing that we can measure. It’s absolutely backwards.

Rules

Every Saturday, I post an image from a math textbook. It’s an image that implicitly or explicitly claims that “this is how we use math in the world!”

I post the image without its mathematical connection and offer three possibilities for that connection. One of them is the textbook’s. Two of them are decoys. You guess which connection is real.

After 24 hours, I update the post with the answer. If a plurality of the commenters picks the textbook’s connection, one point goes to Team Commenters. If a plurality picks one of my decoys, one point goes to Team Me. If you submit a mathematical question in the comments about the image that isn’t pseudocontext, collect a personal point.

(See the rationale for this exercise.)

Answer

The commenters bit down hard on the lure this time, folks. The correct answer — “calculating area of parallelograms” — was selected least.

Delicious pseudocontext, right? The judges all suffered massive strokes when they saw this problem so I couldn’t get their official ruling, but I don’t think it matters. This context fails the “Come on, really?” test for pseudocontext.

“This unpredictable force of nature is threatening a precisely-bounded parallelogram? Come on, really?”

How could we neutralize the pseudocontext? I would be thrilled to see a task that invited students to select and approximate important regions with various quadrilaterals, but let’s not lie about where our tools are useful.

Plates Without States

Hey history teacher-friends!

Lately, I’ve been interested in the math teaching opportunities that arise when we delete and then progressively reveal details of a task. Digital media offers us that luxury while paper denies it.

I saw an opportunity to apply the same approach in history and geography. I took the license plates from all fifty United States and removed explicit references to the state or its outline. Then Evan Weinberg turned it into an online quiz.

Feel free to send your students to that quiz, or to use the images themselves [full, deleted, animated] in any way you want. If you’re feeling obliging, stop by and let us know how it went in the comments.

My Winter Break in Recreational Mathematics

Chase Orton asked all of us, “What is your professional New Year’s resolution?

I said that I wanted to stay skilled as a math teacher. As much as I’d like to pretend I’ve still got it in spite of my years outside of the classroom, I know there aren’t any shortcuts here: I need to do more math and I need to do more teaching. I have plans for both halves of that goal.

In support of “doing more math,” I’ll periodically post about my recreational mathematics. Please a) critique my work, and b) shoot me any interesting mathematics you’re working on.

When Should You Bet Your Coffee?

Ken Templeton sent me an image from his local coffee shop.

Should you bet your free coffee or not? Under what circumstances?

This question offers such a ticklish application of the Intermediate Value Theorem:

If the bowl only has one other “Free Coffee” card in it, you’d want to bet your own card on the possibility of a year of free coffee. But if the bowl had one million cards in it, you’d want to hold onto your card. So somewhere in between one and one million, there is a number of cards where your decision switches. How do you figure out that number? (PS. I realize the IVT doesn’t hold for discrete functions like this one. Definitions offer us a lot of insight when we stretch them, though.)

I asked some of my fellow New Year’s Eve partygoers this question and one person offered a concise and intuitive explanation for her number, a number I personally had to calculate using algebraic manipulation. Someone else then did his best to translate some logistical and psychological considerations into mathematics. (eg. “Even if I win it all, I won’t likely go get a drink every day. Plus I’m risk averse.”) It was such an interesting conversation. Plus what great friends right?

Here’s my work and the 3-Act Task for download.

How Many Bottles of Coca-Cola Are in That Pool?

When I watched this video, I had to wonder, “How many bottles of Coca Cola did they have to buy to fill that pool?”

I tweeted the video’s creator and asked him for the dimensions of the pool.

12 feet across by 30 inches high,” he responded.

Even though the frame of the pool is a dodecagon, the pool lining itself seems roughly cylindrical. So I calculated the volume of the pool and performed some unit conversions to figure out an estimate of the number of 2-liter bottles of Coca Cola he and his collaborators would have to buy.

Here’s my work and the 3-Act Task for download.

How Do You Solve Zukei Puzzles?

Many thanks to Sarah Carter who collected all of these Japanese logic puzzles into one handout.

Carter describes the puzzles as useful for vocabulary practice, but I found myself doing a lot of other interesting work too. For instance, justification. The rhombus was a challenging puzzle for me, and this answer was tempting.

So it’s important for me to know the definition of a rhombus — every side congruent — but also to be able to argue from that definition.

And the challenge that tickled my brain most was pushing myself away from an unsystematic visual search towards a systematic process, and then to write that process down in a way a computer might understand.

For instance, with squares, I’d say:

Computer: pick one of the points. Then pick any other point. Take the distance between those two points and check if you find another point when you venture that distance out on a perpendicular line. If so, see if you can complete the square that matches those three points. If you can’t, move to the next pair.

Commenter-friends:

  • What are your professional resolutions for 2017?
  • What recreational mathematics are you working on lately?
  • If any of you enterprising programmers want to make a Zukei puzzle solver, I’d love to see it.

2017 Jan 2. Ask and ye shall receive! I have Zukei solvers from Matthew Fahrenbacher, Jed, and Dan Anderson. They’re all rather different, each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses.

2017 Jan 2. Shaun Carter is another contender.