SamizdatMath

Here is an interesting fact: did you know that most castles built during the middle ages were made from wood? It's a true fact! But you're probably thinking: wait, if most castles were made of wood, how come when you google the word "castle," all you see are stone edifices? The answer is: survivor bias! Think about it: you build a wood castle, and over the years, what's the thing that threatens it most? FIRE! So all those wood castles burnt to the ground over the last thousand years, while the

This is an incredible, absolutely wonderful investigation that will get your students working with ratios to pursue a worthy goal: to make the best bubble juice that makes the longest lasting bubbles! All you need to do are three ingredients: dishwashing liquid, glycerin (available at pharmacies or online) and di-hydrogen oxide, better known as "water." Your students mix different amounts of the the three ingredients together and test to see how long the bubbles last. But the activity doesn't e

This is an activity designed to help our students learn about the importance of rounding off numbers after they have been divided and using them as a basis for comparison. One of the things our students should learn is the importance of rounding numbers to that they are easier to handle and to cite as a statistic. For example, to say "for the same amount of taxpayer money that Donald Trump has spent on golfing vacations to his Mar-a-Lago resort we could have paid for 9041.59132007 Meals on Whee

This is a comprehensive investigation of basic measures of central tendency (mean, median and mode) using a hands-on approach. This investigation occurs as a set of hands-on experiments that groups of students conduct using a set of 7 cups, Students start by filling the cups with water (or sand, or beans, or whatever you like) to various levels, and then re-arranging the position and levels of the cup in order to find the mean, median and mode. By focusing the students' attention on the concept