This activity is a indoor lab where students gather data within their school to develop the concept of displacement in two dimensional motion.

Students work in groups to find a "treasure" using a treasure map with directions written in vector format.

This lesson plan provides the teacher with an activity to help students calculate the Greatest Common Factor of two or more positive integers and develop a definition based on their exploration. Students find the prime factorization of two positive numbers using factor trees and Venn diagrams to sort the prime factors. The plan includes learning objectives, materials needed, questions to ask students, assessment options, extensions, teacher self-reflection questions, and further references.

In this activity, learners walk the sides and interior angles of various polygons drawn on the playground. As they do so, learners practice rotating clockwise 180 and 360 degrees. Learners discover there is a pattern to the sum of the interior angles of any polygon.

Prepared with pre-algebra or algebra 1 classes in mind, this module leads students through the process of graphing data and finding a line of best fit while exploring the characteristics of linear equations in algebraic and graphic formats. Then, these topics are connected to real-world experiences in which people use linear functions. During the module, students use these scientific concepts to solve the following hypothetical challenge: You are a new researcher in a lab, and your boss has just given you your first task to analyze a set of data. It being your first assignment, you ask an undergraduate student working in your lab to help you figure it out. She responds that you must determine what the data represents and then find an equation that models the data. You believe that you will be able to determine what the data represents on your own, but you ask for further help modeling the data. In response, she says she is not completely sure how to do it, but gives a list of equations that may fit the data. This module is built around the legacy cycle, a format that incorporates educational research feindings on how people best learn.

The principal purpose of the task is to explore a real-world application problem with algebra, working with units and maintaining reasonable levels of accuracy throughout.

The activities in this Illumination lesson plan deal with patterns and the importance of looking at an object/item from more than a single perspective and reaffirms to learners that numerous reasonable solutions are possible. Students investigate a series of items (a list of class names and a parade of animals) that appear to be ordered in some "obvious" ways and also explore ways of sorting items ( a deck of cards and numbered horses) into two disjoint groups on the basis of some definable characteristic. Activity sheets are included in pdf format.

While touring the central lab area at Verso Corporation, the environmental engineers gave an example of how they use mathematics within their job responsibilities. Verso is mandated to complete environmental reports showing they meet the state environmental standards. Often times when data is collected, it is not in the proper units that the state reports require. This was something that both the environmental engineer and co-op engineer were working on--properly converting rates that are specified for the reports. Students will experience finding unit rates and using conversion factors to convert measurements and rates into alternate units of measure.

The purpose of this task is to give students practice writing a constraint equation for a given context. Instruction accompanying this task should introduce the notion of a constraint equation as an equation governing the possible values of the variables in question.

This task looks at zeroes and factorization of a general polynomial. It is related to a very deep theorem in mathematics, the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, which says that a polynomial of degree d always has exactly d roots, provided complex numbers are allowed as roots and provided roots are counted with the proper "multiplicity.''

The intention of this task is to provide extra depth to the standard A-APR.2 it is principally designed for instructional purposes only. The students may use graphing technology: the focus, however, should be on what happens to the function g when x=0 and the calculator may or may not be of help here (depending on how sophisticated it is!).

For a polynomial function p, a real number r is a root of p if and only if p(x) is evenly divisible by x_r. This fact leads to one of the important properties of polynomial functions: a polynomial of degree d can have at most d roots. This is the first of a sequence of problems aiming at showing this fact.

This task continues ``Zeroes and factorization of a quadratic polynomial I.'' The argument here generalizes, as shown in ``Zeroes and factorization of a general polynomial'' to show that a polynomial of degree d can have at most d roots. This task is intended for instructional purposes to help students see more clearly the link between factorization of polynomials and zeroes of polynomial functions.