Thing #4 Thinkfinity

The first activity that I chose (and there are enough to choose from) is the Box Plot graphing activity, found at Box Plot Graph. It is one of the math activities that is located on the NCTM site.  The activity draws the box plot from a set of data. It also calculates the mean and the quartile ranges (the numbers listed under the plot).

This is a useful representation for several reasons:

1. It is large and easy to pick out the points - nice for projection onto a screen.
2. The students can enter their own data and observe the plot.
• Seeing the concept in action is useful - this is not a normal way of thinking about or representing data.
3. There are several activities listed next to the graph. They are activities that the sudents can do to gather appropriate data to create a graph.
4. There are things you can add to the presentation - the ordering of data and dividing it into the quartiles - that can be done on the whiteboard alongside the projected graph.

I would have the students do one of the data-collecting activities, enter the data into the computer, write out the data and organize it on the whiteboard, show the quartiles and compare it with the graph and the data calculations made by the program.

The second activity is called "Congruence Theorems and is a visual representation of the ways in which triangles can be shown to be congruent.  Congruence Theorems lets a student identify the parts of a triangle needed to establish congruent triangles. The student then gets to construct a second triangle using the original information to see if they used information guaranteeing congruence. In a lesson, I would have groups of students choose triangle parameters and demonstrate congruence (or not) to the class. It would be nice to get a computer lab and have students explore several specified configurations and then do a number of explorations on their own - with a small writeup of each configuration and which ones worked versus which ones did not. Screen shot: