Here are some questions that interest me:

1. How useful is 101questions as a proxy for student interest?
2. For example, when we find that 19% of 101questions users skip The Ticket Roll, does that mean that 19% of math students will skip it also?
3. When we scribble information all over our images in our textbooks (instead of presenting concrete contexts) how does that affect their perplexity?
4. For which contexts is video useful? Is the Pyramid of Pennies more perplexing as a photo or a video?
5. Does a tripod matter? How is a student’s interest in a video affected if it features a slight wiggle rather than if the camera is locked down?

Niche questions, certainly, but they interest me so I set up two installations of the 101questions software at eagle.101qs.com and hawk.101qs.com to answer them.

What You Can Do For Me

If you are in a 1:1 classroom where Vimeo and YouTube aren’t blocked, and you have twenty free minutes between now and the end of the year, you can help me answer them.

In the comments, let me know how many students you can commit and in what classes. I’ll e-mail you a handout (looks like this) you can cut up and pass out to your students.

The rest should be smooth. Once the number of conscripted students clears a certain bar, I’ll close the thread.

BTW: Nathan Kraft surveyed his students along similar lines. The results are fascinating.

2012 May 30: That’ll do it. Comments closed. Thanks for your help, everybody.

• Doggie Bandana, Marshall Thompson. Marshall got me good with this one.
• Water Power Plant, Bernard. Similar to Windmill. In both cases, I’d like to know if what we’re seeing would power a light bulb, a fridge, or a car. As in, I really want to know. No math teacherly pretense here. If you can help me answer that question, I am your eager student.
• Snow, man, Patrick Brandt. I skipped this one initially, but Patrick’s question has been gnawing at me since I saw it. Can anyone suggest a redesign?
• London Eye, Edwin Ulmer. I’ve been looking for just this kind of clip for a long while. Three cheers for Internet-based collaboration.
• Shoot the Gap, LDH. Recently, I expressed a sense that posting video of GGB / GSP applets tends to miss the best parts of both. This one is different.

My own listings:

• Coffee Traveler
• Popcorn Picker

At the end of a session in Toronto just now somebody asked me how much time it takes to come up with these kinds of tasks. “More or less than when you made tasks on paper?”

“Definitely more,” I said. But, brother, can you see I’m trying to suppress some kind of goofy smile in Popcorn Picker? Same with Coffee Traveler, where I’m grinning off screen. At a certain point, I stopped coding this kind of production as “work.” No disrespect at all if that’s not your thing.

Data Dump:

Do people who upload more have higher perplexity scores? No, they don’t. I would like to see an animation of those points over time, though.

• Circle or Polygon? Scott Farrar. This thing is poised to take over the all-time list once it crosses the 25-response threshold.
• Lemonade, Christopher Danielson. On some other site – let’s call it Bizarro 101questions – Danielson uploaded a video in which he dropped a can of concentrate into each of those containers and started filling them with water.
• Megalodon Tooth, Jake Jouppi. I know I declared a moratorium on this kind of imagery (which is all over the site at this point) but think about the size of that shark, okay?
• Ping Pong, Bob Lochel. Great first act with strong implications for the third.
• Roller Coaster Steepness, Tom Ward. An excellent supercut of roller coasters that asks the student to first decide which one feels steepest (that’s a low rung on the ladder of abstraction) before using mathematical analysis to determine which one actually is steepest.

My own listings:

• Amgen Race
• Pocket Change

Data Dump:

Median photo perplexity: 46.
Median video perplexity: 51.

Photos own the top ten list but videos are more perplexing, on balance.

An embarrassment of riches this week. It was difficult keeping this to five:

• Too good to be true, Scott Keltner. So is it … free … then? I give this image strong odds on provoking a class debate and highlighting some of your students’ misconceptions of percent growth.
• Car Chase, Ryan Brown. The current darling of 101questions. (12 questions, no skips, as of this writing.) Notice how the first car smacks into the second, which was hidden off-screen. That’s stylish camera work!
• Muggsy Bogues, Tony Gumbo. The question, “How much shorter is Muggsy Bogues?” is one thing. “How many different ways can you express that difference?” is another. (eg. Absolute v. relative.) Start with the first. End with the second.
• First day of school, John Golden. “Is your height linear?” It’s a striking visual and the units along the “x-axis” are identical so you have a rare moment to examine the growth of height over time using people in photographs rather than points on a graph.
• Plinko, Michael Pershan. Yeah, great cut at the end there. Where’s the wisdom in putting the biggest pay-out beneath the most likely bucket? Bowen? (Related: this image, taken from this video.)

Other notes:

• Counting is so last winter. You’ll notice that your first ten responses will generally come from the same ten-or-so people who have seen everything uploaded to 101questions and keep current on all new uploads. It’s interesting to watch their tastes change. For instance, counting lots of little things used to be a lot of fun for this crowd, but now, as Tony Gumbo’s Bryant Denny Stadium can attest, counting is out. (Which isn’t to say that rating won’t pick up once more casual users check in, just that the obsessives have made their decision about counting.)
• Speaking of obsessives, Andrew Stadel has written a great tutorial for getting the most out of 101questions.
• Veggie Juice swings for the fences. You decide where it lands.
• Closing. Timon Piccini’s Cab Ride is the first first act to “close,” which means 100 people responded to it. Now it goes to the very bottom of the pile on the homepage, where it’ll only be seen once people have seen everything else. Initially, I thought first acts would close in a matter of hours after being uploaded. That was naive. It took months.

Plus my own listing:

• Edmonton Water Consumption, uploaded on a dare from Sean Geraghty. My assumption is it’s going to get clobbered.

Featured Comment

Ryan Brown:

At this point, I’ve posted about 300 questions. I’ve noticed that I’ve kind of changed my approach for coming up with questions for other people’s items. Rather than try to guess the question that fits as math teacher, I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of a 9th grader and decide “will they find this perplexing”? Fuzzy pictures: skip. Small font items like receipts and print advertisements that are full of numbers and words but no overtly visual content: skip. I’m also noticing that I’m beginning to skip items that are repeats of previously seen items — even just same genre items like super large ________. Initially, the questions were leaping right out at me. But now I feel like the student who says “oh, we’re doing this again.” No longer perplexed if I know what the teacher wants me to say. (Full disclosure: 2 of my 7 uploads are “world’s largest ______” related). Am I too harsh here, or are other people taking a similar approach?

I’m also finding a difference between “perplexing” and “interesting”. There’s a ton of stuff out there that is very cool and very interesting (intricate artwork, geometric designs, etc), but there is no obvious solvable mathematical question that is just begging to be asked. I skip those every time.