Math-Sci-Guy

When asked which math topic is their least favorite, many students would say Proofs. This is understandable, especially when students don't have good examples to study. This packet contains nine proofs in various forms: fill-in-the-blank (for if you are just starting proofs with your class), unstructured (for classes who have been practicing proofs for a bit and don't need the help), and the answer keys (suitable to go with either previous version). I envision this packet as a transition betw

This printout gives students an opportunity to explore a (possibly) real-life situation, empirically determine the minimum number of moves required to accomplish the task, then gather the data and find a pattern to describe it. The activity is completely printable (which also gives students the opportunity to do something with their hands (cutting) and lets them practice fine motor coordination, though if you want to spice it up students could cut discs out of corrugated cardboard (

Here are some printable unit circle diagrams. One has all special angles and coordinates labeled on it in degrees and radians; one has blank spaces for all of the labels, and the third is also blank but without the spaces for radian angle measures. The first quadrant also includes the calculation for each coordinate pair, so you can discuss the pattern and how understanding the pattern removes the need for memorization of this entire page of data. The files are zipped PDFs.

This printout of some NASA news article headings gives teachers the chance to discuss the crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which happened because one contracted company built part of the computer to think in metric units and another built a different part to think in imperial units. That's $193 million wasted because people didn't carefully label their units! The back of the printout has the SI unit prefixes, so this can be an introduction to them, and how metric conversion is so much simpler