Musings from Mrs. Galvan

So one of my favorite people I have met since discovering the #mtbos is Jed Butler . At Edcamp earlier this year we got to chit chat in person and in just a few minutes, I had several ideas that I wanted to implement, including doing a variation of his assignment called Recycle Robot. Last year (see old prompt ), I had my geometry students find an object at home to measure and calculate surface area and volume. Then they wrote a blog post about their item (see student sample ). This year, I wanted them to create something and the Recycle Robot was a good match. I made a few slight changes, including a requirement to convert the surface area to units of post-it notes as I wanted them to connect this project with the day we spent on File Cabinet . I reread my short reflection on how this assignment went last year and my goal for the assignment holds. Like last year students are doing more than calculating something from a textbook. They are interacting with the object in a way that ...

Today's task - Surface Area. We had more fun by using Mr. Stadel's lesson - File Cabinet . They had a post it to measure, rulers, paper and a calculator. They started by making a guess. Some of them got pretty close (960!) My students are still not used to doing these types of tasks... their questions going into a 3 act tasks hint to a bit of insecurity in being asked to think outside the box, or outside the filing cabinet. Still we got to the key question: How many Post-Its does it take to cover the filing cabinet? Other questions: "What did he spend on post its to do this?" "How long did this take him?" "Are you going to tell us how many squares inches is in a post it?" "Does he have a life?" (Sorry Mr. Stadel) Their answer: 936 "Does this mean if we take one post it and cut it up, it would cover all the spots he left blank?" :)