Tag Archives: math1

Well Flow Rate – “Real World” Math

Keeping with the easy definition of “real world” being “math someone needed to do at their job” – I actually prefer the term “industry math”, but regardless here’s the question that needed to be answered:

My wife’s working on a project where they are building a house on a property without a well or access to city water.  So they dug a 425ft well that was 8 inch in diameter.  When they finished the dig at 3:00 pm it was completely dry.  The next day, at 7:00 am, the well had filled with water up to 45ft below the surface.

How fast is the well filling up in gallons per minute?

They wanted 1.25 gallons per minute.  Do they need to dig another well?  Wells are about $50 a foot – so yeah, they would rather not dig another one.

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(digging the well)

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(well finished! That’s the cap they left on it)

They used a falling rock to determine how much of the well had filled with water.  Well (not the noun), they also used a cell phone connected to a string but isn’t that just too obvious?

Here’s the video of the rock drop:

Well Rock Drop

 

Cheers!

“Real-Life” Annulus Problem!

I just can’t type “real-life” without quotes because I’m yet to resolve what “real-life” means in a math class.  But for this post it means – “Math someone needed to do at their job”.  And in this post that someone is my wife – who much to her distain and my joy – does a lot of geometry as a project manager at a construction firm.

So here’s what we need to know:  How much cement is needed to make that border?  We need the answer in cubic yards because you buy cement in cubic yards.

Concrete

The image below provides some of the context for the problem – The cement border is being used to circle an existing tree.

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I was actually surprised how open the middle was on this problem.  Yet students used two main strategies.  The first was the standard subtract the areas and multiply by the height, or they subtracted the volumes of both cylinders directly.  The second was the find the perimeter, think of the wall as a rectangle (dimensions of 2*pi*r X 1′), find the area of that rectangle and then multiply by the height.

One student using the second strategy used a radius of 14ft and got a solution of 16.2 cubic yards.  He told me he knew the answer would be a little too small because of only using the inner radius.  Another students used 14.5 and got the same solution as the area subtracting syndicate.

Converting from cubic feet to cubic yards is a great time to practice your perplexed I wonder why you divide by 27? face.

By the way the wall ended up costing around $35000.  I can’t believe how long I would have to work to put a wall around a tree 🙁

Cheers!

– B

 

Adding Value – A Starbucks Lesson

This lesson could be better – but it was my first shot at it. I still definitely recommend it because of the great math conversations we had around convenience and adding value. Here’s the driving question I used:

What is Convenience Worth?

But it didn’t work as well as I wanted it to because we were really only looking at the convenience of the k-cup vs. ground coffee vs. going to a coffee shop.  It’s a cool driving question, but not necessarily the focus of this lesson.  This lesson is based more on “adding value” – where value is defined as what people are willing to pay for.  Starbucks added value to it’s coffee grounds by putting them into K-cups, and that is why they are able to charge more for it.  So how much value did they add?

So here’s the lesson:

Angle 1:  K-cups vs. Ground Coffee

Starbucks makes K-cups and ground coffee, and both sell for $10!  [excellent] So are they the same price?  The K-cups are a package of 10, 12.5 gram cups.  And the ground coffee is in a 340g bag.  Starbucks is able to elevate it’s price for K-cups because they are more convenient than traditional brewing methods.  So what’s the value of that convenience?

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Angle 2:  Coffee Shop vs. Brewing At Home

It is more expensive to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks than it is to brew it at home.  Yet people still do it.  What does that cost difference tell us about the value of convenience?  Here’s one of Starbucks menus:

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There was definitely a period at the beginning where students did not know how to begin – or perhaps what they were suppose to do.  It took some time for them, and to extent me as well. to define the question.  I told them that it is natural in any problem solving situation to spend time defining the question, framing assumptions, setting up your analysis.

My teacher moves were as follows:

– Write about a time when you paid extra for convenience.  Talk it out.

– Ok so the value of convenience depends on how convenient the thing is versus the alternative.  [Future project could be to quantify convenience itself, rather than only focusing on Starbucks pricing].   That means we should standardize the convenience we are analyzing.  So let’s look at convenience through the lens of Starbucks pricing.

– What does the pricing of Starbucks coffee tell us about the value of convenience?  How could we use Starbucks to quantify its convenience.  What information would we need?

– Give various pricing data

– Ask students to come up with a value for the convenience of the k-cup vs. ground coffee, or the value of going to Starbucks versus brewing at home.

– Helping individually.   My most effective question was “For $10 you get 340g of ground coffee.  How much would it cost to get 340g of coffee in K-cups?”

It is also an interesting conversation that ground coffee and whole bean are the exact same price.  So Starbucks is saying that the convenience of having the beans ground for you adds no value to the product.

After the activity we read an article from Proffer Brainchild titled “ADDING VALUE:  A Lesson From Starbucks”

Here are some examples of student work.  The first example was the highest quality paper I received.

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Lesson Learned:

It’s clear that not all students understood what I was asking – and so I concede that “What’s the value of Convenience?” was not a good driving question for this particular activity. I do see it that prompt as a great math modeling problem where students try to quantify an inherently qualitative thing. But that’s not what they were doing here.

Next year I am going to try and focus first on the k-cup vs. ground coffee prices and stick the economics concept of “adding value”. How much value is added when Starbucks puts their grounds in K-cups vs. ground coffee? And this is not just about the calculations, it’s about the argument.

 

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Monomial Partners

“What’s your name, what’s your monomial?”

This is a great activity that was inspired by Matt Vaudrey’s Equation Speed Dating.  In this lesson each student gets to create their own monomial – which I constrained to having to be even and with a variable.  Then they break up their paper into three columns:  Partner / Our Binomial / Our Rectangle.  The students pick a partner and join each others monomials together to create “Our Binomial”.  Then they factor their binomial and represent it as a rectangle by labeling it’s dimensions and indicating the area.  I circulate the room and once it appears every group is finished, I have everyone get up and find a new partner.  I’m demanding here that all students get up out of their seats and move somewhere new.

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After a couple rounds I started having them draw their monomial and their partners monomial as separate rectangles, and then draw them together.

I have been focusing on a geometric approach to factoring, so the rectangle column was a great addition to previous times when I have done this activity but only asked for the solution.

The column “Our Binomial” does a nice job reinforcing that a binomial is the combination of two monomials.

The Advice

Don’t require them to say “what’s your monomial?”, “do you agree that our binomials is….  “, but inspire them to say it by modeling it.  A lot of my students were saying it because I was giving them messages that anytime they get the chance to say “monomial” or “binomial” they need to take it.

Tell the students not to move onto a new partner when they are finished.  They need to wait until you tell them to switch partners.

Remind them that you are really counting on the partners to catch any errors! Because you can’t do the problems on the board since every pair is working a different problem.  “And yes, you are the partner I am counting on for someone else.”

“What’s your name, what’s your monomial?”   No that’s not a pickup line for Speed Dating…  or is it?