--What is a 3 by 3?
--What is a 100 x 100?
--Why is he using math terms?
--What does a 100 x 100 look like?
I learned that you cannot assume students know all the In-N-Out lingo just because they live in So Cal. Naturally, I showed the students these burgers:
Now that students have a context of what we are dealing with, it's time for guesses. I ask for students to write down their best guess of the price for a 100 x 100. As I was recording the high and low in the class, one student said $8. What do you do with that? Do I record it and just move along or do I challenge the student a little? I just moved along but thinking more about it I suppose I would have asked the student to give me his best guess for a single cheese burger. Whatever price I would have received, I could have asked, ''Just so I'm clear, you are saying that a single cheese burger is x dollars and a 100 x 100 is going to be $8?" Not sure if this is the right thing in the first Act. I know that I am trying to build the low threshold in the first Act of the lesson so students can all participate. Will this shut students off?
Act II
Information needed. I have done a slight modification to what I have seen Dan Meyer and Robert Kaplinsky do and am really interested on feedback here. After students wrote down information needed, I gave the students one more task. The task was to discuss with a partner why you needed that information. Specifically, what were students planning on doing with that information. Here are two examples from the class:
So, this is what they got:
The two common errors that flooded the room was multiplying the price of a cheeseburger by 100 and multiplying the price of a double-double by 50. After some time I allow students to present their work on the whiteboard. So one of my scaffolding questions was, "If you multiply the price of a cheeseburger by 100, what will you get in return?" The light bulb goes on "hopefully" with this visual aid: