I’m sure you’ve spent some time in your math classroom talking about ways to explore the math behind different real world phenomena. We often just refer to it as “mathematical modeling”, and it really can help students make sense of the ideas they’re studying. For example, I watched the Ted Talk from Pixar’s Tony DeRose back in 2014 and it fundamentally changed the way that I teach coordinate geometry both in algebra and geometry.
In this week’s blog post, we took a page out of the playbook of Ontario educator Jim Cash’s Scratch lesson “How well does this model Earth’s gravity?“. We wanted the kids to be able to experience the math behind a ball drop in a simplistic way that allows the numbers to jump out at them 🙂 So if you are teaching about rate of change (slope), quadratics, or just want to do some mathematical modeling with your students click the lesson below.
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