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Presentation Home
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Teacher Comment
* This teacher's comment was collected as a reflection in a
graduate math education course. It was not written to promote
the boat activity.
I watched my Calculus students this week work with two
PRISM fellows on using math to build the boat that will hold the
most weight. I saw the boy who has trouble staying awake in
class work equally as hard as the boy whose whole life seems to
be about math. Another student told me everyday about his
progress with the problem. I sat in the back of the room,
stunned at how well they were applying what they were taught.
Truthfully, I was shocked at how well they came up with their
own functions. The Japanese know what they are doing in
education. I could see that this week just by watching my
Calculus class. Maybe, who cares what the testing shows. Or,
maybe my students will test all the better because they can
think. Isn’t that what we are supposed to be all about? I want
my students to be able to think. I do not want to be doing the
thinking for them.
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Student Comments
* These student comments were collected as part of a weekly
reflection assignment in their Calculus class. They were not
prompted or written to promote the boat activity.
I really liked the boat experiment that we did. I thought
that was a fun way to tie everything together. The student
teacher really seems to know what he’s talking about. I liked
how he tied together what we are doing in the class with the
boats and how a real engineer would have to know those formulas
and what to do. Of course, if you’re not planning on being an
engineer then you don’t really care, but it still helped me
realize that this material is being used in the real world,
where as before I didn’t think it was being used for ordinary
jobs.
When I first heard about the PRISM project that we were
going to do this Thursday and Friday I did not like the idea and
thought that would basically be a waste of time. However, once I
actually participated in the fist day’s activity, I thought it
was very fun but also thought that it was very useful in
understanding optimization. I thought that this project fell at
the prefect time in our learning, and I was helped greatly with
section 5.5. I thought that the grad. student from Illinois
State University was very smart and an interesting person to
listen to. I thought that his teaching, on top of the info. you
have already taught us, helped the class learn the material.
Today, we had a “real-world” project that used
optimization- the boat challenge. We had to construct a boat out
of a single sheet of laminated printer paper, scissors, and
tape. This boat needed to hold the maximum weight when placed in
a tub of water. I originally thought that the surface area of
the boat would be related to the buoyancy of the water, and the
height of the boat would be affected by the surface area. In
reality, the volume was the single problem that would help
create an optimized boat; we needed to maximize the volume to
create the best craft. However, our group did not consider this,
and we built a random boat, which actually turned out to hold
1030g, third best in the class.
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