Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, Lunar New Year, and Groundhog Day

Chinese New Year. Year of the Monkey

The Year of the Monkey – Monday, February 8th is Chinese New Year. Students become a little more familiar with this spring festival, appreciate the importance of this time of year in Asian communities, reflect on the luni-solar calendar and calculate how often in the cycle of 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches this year of the Fire Monkey will come again … least common multiples and patterns

MardiGras-masksMardi Gras – Tuesday, February 9, 2016, will be the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of the season of Lent.  Mardi Gras is the last hoorah and is celebrated throughout the world with feasting, partying, and general indulgence.  In New Orleans revelers throw and collect purple, green, and gold beads. Students get a chance to examine the monetary and environmental cost of this bead exuberance with our unit pricing and recycling activity.

How have the cost of Super Bowl ads changed?puppy-love – Students analyze and graph our data of all of the previous Super Bowls and decide whether the change in ad cost is linear, exponential, or something else.  Then they predict the cost of the future ads.

Super Bowl Numerals – Roman numerals are rarely taught in our curriculum but they are used in our society.  Give students a chance to do some really cool addition with Roman numerals and refresh their meaning.

Typical Super Bowl scores – Encourage your students to guess what the final Super Bowl score will be.  Analyze the data in class finding the mean, median and range of past game scores.  Then give students the opportunity to correct their predictions.  Follow up after the game.

4th down – Use data to analyze whether to “go for it”, punt, or kick a field goal.

4.5millionSuper Bowl Ads & Scientific Notation: Write those big commercial cost numbers with scientific notation & reflect on favorite commercials.

groundhogGroundhog Day – Sunday, February 2nd is also Groundhog day.  How often is Punxsutawney Phil correct in predicting the coming of Spring?  Relative probability can be introduced and mastered with our activity using Phil’s past predictions.

And how about some bonus NFL or Super Bowl related activities:

Clean close shave – Brian shows a graphic that correlates facial hair to quarterback ranking and allows you to bring up sampling, causation versus correlation, misleading data, measures of central tendency, variability and data visualization

deflated-footballDeflate-gate – Students work with a negative number line to define and express the present controversy of under inflated footballs.  Using a football gauge that reads zero when the football is properly inflated at 13 psi, students express the values by graphing, using expressions, and inequalities. A little physics lets them evaluate the validity of temperature change resulting in this loss of pressure.

Watson Saves -Watch the video with your class and use our activity to motivate students to figure out who ran a greater distance by using the Pythagorean Theorem.  In the video Teddy Bruschi says that Watson must have ran about 120 yards, maybe even more.  Use the video and/or our activity to see if Teddy’s estimate is about right.

Losing Teams in the Playoffs A look at the worst teams (by regular season record) to ever make the playoffs in the NFL, NBA and MLB.  Fractions, Ratios, Percent.

NFL Home field advantage  Students use an infographic to compare NFL team home and away wins.  Students consider the best home team, the best away team and consider if NFL teams really do seem to have a home field advantage.

Which TV is the Best Deal? Time to buy a new HDTV for the big game.  Which TV gives the best deal considering screen size?  Integrates area and unit rate.

 

from Yummy Math http://www.yummymath.com/2016/super-bowl-mardi-gras-lunar-new-year-and-groundhog-day/


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