Who can resist this picture?




Yeah, I drew it.


YOU: The kids thought that was pretty funny. I gave them one minute to write any questions they have about the math they would be using in their INB's. I took the quote from Phil Daro, "Writing means silence." I told them if they couldn't think of anything to write, draw the picture...theirs' were way better than mine. (Pictures later)

I have a monster fire truck...

Then I had the students to choose a partner and gave them 2 minutes to talk about the problem.

WE then had a group discussion. One young man walked up to the board and measured the width of the basketball to the width of the rim. "Is the hoop height regulation?" (Yay! someone asked!) yup, 10ft. "How far is he from the hoop?" "Is it allowed to have a fire truck on the court?" "What does he win?" (Easy, $1,000 per basket...of course they wanted to re-enact the whole thing...ya...no)

Without much prompting, someone asked, "how long does it take him to make a shot?" I revised this a bit, to "How long does it take the basketball to reach the hoop?"

I showed them this picture from Dan Meyers, To boost interest.


I told them the basketball was released from 18ft in the air. We Googled the average initial velocity of a basketball...it was 10ft/sec. I told them, since we weren't in motion, let's use 8ft/sec. (Makes numbers nicer for Zero Product Property.)

YOU/WE: Same thing again: one minute to write, two minutes to discuss, a few minutes to debrief. Many students had already written h = -16t^2 - vt +s. Sweet, right?

I pointed out the ideas I saw and heard that were productive and pointed out the ones that were on track, but needed some tweaking (desired height is not zero), and even some that were not at all relevant...um, like the circumference of the basketball...

I let them fuss and struggle and figure. It was so much fun! And it was too much fun to talk about why they got one negative root. We followed the arc of the ball behind the fire truck...there were a lot of "ahhhs."

At the end I showed this shot also from Dan,





Then the real discussions began, "That is totally Photoshopped...Dude...it was never going to make it."

It's going in!

I get it and can put it on the board.