STEM4U

This is an activity for high school math students that can consolidate their understanding of the fundamental counting principle and permutations and link it to the concept of probability and statistics. Students roll a set of three dice repeatedly and generate a frequency graph. Then they examine the theoretical probabilities for dice outcomes to compare it to their experimental data.

This is a project for high school math students where they learn how mortgages work. They try looking into their future, decide on a house they'd want to buy and calculate a monthly mortgage payment.

This is a lab-style activity for a high school math class where students will construct a simple pendulum with an eraser and a piece of string, and make measurements to determine the relationship between the length of the string and the period of the pendulum. They'll be prompted to create a table of values and a graph and then fit a radical equation to their graph based on their measurements. It's a really worthwhile activity for students to see real-life applications of mathematical functions.

This is a ppt presentation that you can show students on pi day (march 14th). It explains many of the reasons why the number is important and goes through some history of the calculation of its digits.

This is a midterm review activity for my student's first semester of calculus. It's focused on applications of derivatives and includes questions about curve sketching, the mean value theorem, linear approximations, related rates, optimization and L'Hopital's rule. It's geared as a review of differential calculus before students start learning about antiderivatives. When I teach, this is done as a carousel activity where students move to different stations which are timed and work on the questio

This is a project for a high school math class in the logarithms chapter/unit. Here, students read a short paragraph about deforestation that contains some numbers and then use those numbers to generate a graph describing forest cover in the world over time. They'll then be prompted to fit an exponential function to their graph and use their function to estimate a number of other pieces of information. It's a worthwhile project for students to gain an understanding of what exponential functions

This is a pretty cool project for a high school calculus class. Students will choose a country in the world and then use the population data provided to make a logistic function to approximate the population growth in that country. This is for the differential equations chapter of high school calculus (or college calculus). It shows a great application of math to the social sciences.

This is a project for a high school mathematics class where students are challenged to make a box from a piece of A4 paper with maximum volume. They'll be prompted to design an equation to represent the volume of the box, and create a graph to find size of corner cuts that will produce the biggest box. It's a really worthwhile activity for students to see a real-world application of what polynomial functions can be used for.

This is a hands on project where students simulate predator-prey relationships in an ecosystem of their choice. It's very engaging and it's typically done in groups of 2 or 3 students over the course of about 3 classes. This project involves a wonderful blend of art, literacy, numeracy, and science. Students get to be creative in designing their ecosystem. They get to do simulate the ecosystem in a board game type way. They record quantitative information and display it visually in a graph, and

This is an activity for the differential equations chapter of high school calculus. Students will make their own measurements while a cup of hot water cools in their classroom, they'll generate an equation and draw the graph of an exponential function. It's a really good activity for students to gain a better understanding of how differential equations work and what they can be used for.

This is a ppt for the different calculus topic "volume of solids of a known cross section". The two examples are challenging yet interesting: finding the volume of balloons you could fit inside the Eiffel tower's frame and finding the volume of a starfruit. It's recommended for students that think calculus is easy and are looking for a real challenge.

This is a great project to introduce students to graphing data. They create a survey question of their own, ask 30 people, draw a graph by hand or with a computer that includes a title, axis labels and scales. Then they can present the findings of their survey to the class. The marking is done by peer and self assessment. Its a nice activity to put the student's learning in their own hands and help them remember how to make good graphs.

This is a handout which can be given to student as a step by step "manual" for factoring quadratics with the decomposition method. I usually give it to them with the step by step example on one side of the page and the factoring flow chart on the back of the page. My students have really appreciated having this in front of the them when they are first learning how to factor quadratic polynomials.