Sunday, April 22, 2012

Mathematics in the Community


1. You and three friends want to split an order of cheesy bread from Marco's pizza.  The only problem is, the cook forgot to divide up the pieces.  How will you partition the bread to make sure all of you get the same amount?  Show at least three different ways you can cut the bread.




2. You have $12.50 to spend on dinner at Marco's Pizza.  List all of the different items you can afford.

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1 comment:

  1. Caitlin ShanahanApril 23, 2012 at 7:59 AM

    Christy, I like these tasks a lot. For one, I think students will be excited to do problems that have to do with pizza because, well, everybody loves pizza. I also like how simple the wording of the problems are, yet they require the students to do complex work. Both questions are open-ended and allow students to develop their own procedures to solve the problem, which I really like! It definitely makes it a more higher order task and allows students the freedom to solve the problem in a way that makes sense to them. I would consider the first problem to be higher-level procedures with connections because it allows students to solve the problem using a representation of their choice, but it also suggests some pathways to follow by using words like "divide" and "partition" suggesting that it is a problem involving fractional pieces. I think the second problem is also higher-level, but more doing mathematics since there is no suggested pathway to solve the problem. The students must explore the math concept more deeply and come up with their own solutions and a procedure to reach that solution.

    I think both of these problems can be easily applied to student lives so it is very authentic. If a student has pizza sometime outside of the classroom they could use the knowledge they learned in these tasks to apply it to real life situations.

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