The days before Christmas/winter break is filled with antsy kids, stressed-out teachers, and edicts by administrators to maintain academic rigor all the way until the final day’s dismissal bell. It’s not always the most wonderful time of the year.
I love escape room style activities and whodoneit/Clue mystery activities and have incorporated them into my units on a regular basis, using pre-made activities as well as creating my own. In this vein, I set out to create a scavenger hunt/math puzzle/field trip activity rooted in some real numbers and realistic calculations. After struggling to find a starting point for the better part of a week, the “Tour de Worcester” came together over a recent snow day.
We begin by taking a look at part of a map of Worcester with several locations highlighted – a local college, a local monument, a store, a roller skating rink, and our school. Using Google Maps, I created a walking map with the locations labeled. Next, I informed the class it takes approximately 3 hours to walk this route, and then asked for their estimation on how FAR (in miles) they would need to walk. The estimates ranged from two miles all the way to guesses in the 100s. Upon learning that the distance from Worcester to Boston is just under fifty miles, some students adjusted their estimates while others held firm with their original guesses.
This leads into some expressions. Using Google Maps, I found the walking distance and time for the five segments of the journey. Dividing the distance (in miles) by time (in minutes) yielded a rate (of miles per minute). I did this for all five segments to see if a pattern emerged; it turns out, while the rates varied for each leg of the trip, the numbers were all around 0.04 miles per minute. And then, a lightbulb! Going back to the distance = rate x time formula, I made my rate of walking to be 0.03mi/min and multiplied it by the time given by Google Maps. The difference between this product and the distance from Google got tacked on to the end of my multiplication problem. Eureka! I’ve just created expressions that describe the distance between two points! I swapped out the 0.03 for a variable, created expressions that had both constants as well as terms with a variable… and my first problem was done! Since we wrapped up a discussion of expressions, I asked students to add the five expressions together and come up with one simple expression that described the total walking distance for the scavenger hunt. Upon giving students the value for ‘x’ (again, 0.03 mi/min), a little bit of algebra and order of operation work yielded a total distance of 8.6 miles.
Having completed one problem, the next few seemed to fall into place. For the local college, I ask students to write the fraction of students who attend the school out of all the college students in the city (values were collected from the college’s website). Using the reduced form of this fraction, students completed a “riddle” regarding the mascot of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).
For the historical monument, Bancroft Tower, students are asked two questions: 1) what is the height of the shortest person in their group? and 2) how many shortest students (written as a mixed number), stacked head to toe, would it take to reach the top of the tower?
At the retail shop, I provided students with a sampling of items that can be purchased and a way for them to get some spending money. Then, students needed to create a list of things to buy, with the catch that they cannot have more than $3 of unspent money in their pockets.
Moving on to the roller skating rink, the business offers two kinds of parties – birthday and private. With information from their website, students calculate the cost of a party for their class and asked which party (birthday or private) would be the better deal and why.
Finally, the scavenger hunt concludes with two brainteasers back at their school. Solving them means the group has completed the activity and hopefully refreshed their skills and memory on some of the concepts they’ve studied thus far.
Finishing a page/activity, rewarding in and of itself in theory, wasn’t a complete motivator. As each place was visited and activity completed, a small reward was given to the group.
Here is a link to the activity. Let me know what you think and, if you use it, let me know that too!
Math topics covered include:
- adding/subtracting expressions
- evaluating expressions
- greatest common factor
- finding equivalent fractions/reducing fractions
- unit conversions
- division; writing answers as mixed numbers
- decimal operations
- rounding & estimating
- real-world problem solving
Artur Duque 