Math Man

A semester long multi-disciplinary project created by Mr. McDevitt that revolves around a typical first year Algebra curriculum. Students will create their own small business, write linear equations to model their cost, revenue, and profit, represent their equations as graphs and in tabular form, and use systems of equations to find the break-even point for their business. Finally students will have to present their business model to a venture capitalist.

Want a real life application of Algebra? Want your students to take responsibility for their grade? This project created by the Math man has students write the simplified variable expression that can be used to calculate their grade based on a given weighting system. Students will write the grade expression for all of their courses and program Microsoft Excel with these expressions. Students will now have a personalized grade book they can use the whole year round to figure out their grade.

This activity created by the Math Man will give your students an opportunity to investigate, extend, generalize, and create patterns. Students will look at a pattern and use numerical and visual reasoning to extend the pattern and discuss subsequent functional behavior. Students will write a function that could model the patterns perimeter and total number of lines. Finally students will create their own pattern.

This is a standard deck of 52 playing cards where instead of the four suits you have the four ways of representing a function, and instead of giving the number of each card students have to figure out the card number by finding the slope. With these cards students can play games they already know and enjoy and do some algebra at the same time. These cards deal strictly with linear functions.

Can you use algebra to predict the weather? Who can I trust to give me the most accurate weather forecast? Could I make a forecast that is better then the pros? This activity created by the Math Man will answer such questions. Students will look at past trends to predict the weather for the upcoming weeks and compare the accuracy of multiple weather forecast services with their own forecast. Students will use regression to discover how accurate weather forecasts are.

In this activity students will decide which graph would be used to match the specifics of a story about a fictional hike up a mountain. Students will decide on how to label each axis, interpret slopes as a rate of change, and write their own story that would match one of the given graphs.