Sunday, January 25, 2009

15 Engaging High School Math Activities

We've been reviewing for quarterly finals this week, and I was looking for a fun, engaging activity for reviewing slope with my Algebra I students. My research turned up a site called simply High School Math Activities, which has 15 great ideas covering all different levels of HS math.

I used activity #8, Sloping Letters, as a homework assignment. Basically, students use lines with positive, negative, zero and undefined slopes to describe letters of the alphabet and in turn decode a message. As suggested on the site, I then asked students to create their own message using the same "slope code". My students seemed to enjoy it better than your average assignment.

Looking at the other ideas, I can't wait to use the Graphing Project and Using Trig to Calculate Pi with my Algebra II students next quarter. We'll be studying quadratics in Algebra I soon, so the Acceleration Due to Gravity activity will fit in great. Towards the end of the year, as we try to prep students for Geometry the following year, the Pop Can Assignment sounds like fun too.

It's so rare to find any website with so many great, straightforward lesson ideas in one place. I'll be digging into this one for quite a while.