Headlines from a Mathematically Illiterate World

http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/12/02/headlines-from-a-mathematically-literate-world/

The longer I teach, the more I think that the math that feels most important for students to take away from my class is about learning to read, interpret, and critically evaluate the logical/illogical statements that float around every day. I do actively enjoy pure math kinds of things, but if it came down to a choice of residue, I'd give up a robust understanding of derivatives for my kids leave being able to read a graph in the newspaper and evaluate the reasonableness of the latest study's claim.

I think it would be really fun for kids to find ridiculous statements in news articles and correct them like this. It would be interesting to develop that critical eye for poorly worded statements, both from a language and a mathematical perspective.

More Grocery Shrinking Options

There has to be a volume problem/project in here. The setup: you work for some company that wants to cut costs by shrinking its product... but you don't want the consumer to know. Consider 3 options for shrinking the product without making it too different:

• Change the shape of the packaging (box 1 in the comic above). Needs to be a change that's subtle enough that someone won't notice. Could be totally dramatic (changing rectangular package to a cylinder or frustrum). Could be subtle (shave a little bit off here, a little bit off here, no one will notice). Could be sneaky (when bottle manufacturers make the bottom of the bottle not flat).
• Make the actual product smaller (upper right box in the comic above). Seriously, how much could you save by making the holes in cheerios or bagels bigger? 
• Filling the package with something else (the ice cream gnome above). Less ice cream, more toys!

I wonder what givens you'd need to give kids to start with and how open-ended it actually could/should be. I would love for kids to actually build their packages so that they could show why it's a sneaky change!

(Yes, this is teaching kids to be corporate scammers, but hey, preparation for the real world, right? Maybe it will also teach them to be suspicious of corporate scammers!)

Dictionary of Numbers

A Chrome extension that gives context to numbers.

From playing around with it, it's not as easy as I'd like, but there are some cool things. Did you know that the International Space Station weights 1 million pounds? I like the idea of giving context to numbers so that kids/people can have a reference point, especially for big numbers.

Honey, I mis-calculated my math?

In this Honey, I Shrunk the Kids trailer (an amazing movie...) at 0:41 the littlest kid does some calculations. "We're a quarter of an inch tall and 64 feet from the house. That's the equivalent of 3.2 miles."



If his calculations are correct, how tall were the kids originally? Whose height was he using to make his calculations?

Other questions that might be relevant:
-How did he know "we're a quarter of an inch tall"?
-If all the kids are a quarter of an inch tall, did the shrink ray really work? Alternately, if all kids are not a quarter of an inch tall, did the shrink ray really work?
-What evidence is there in the video that the kid's calculations are off?

The World as You've Never Seen It Before

http://www.worldmapper.org

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

How Big is that Country?

This site lets you pick a country and compare a number of its quality-of-life stats to the US. But I think the most interesting part is the map that overlays the country on top of your geographic area. Given that I feel like I understand the state of California as a good scale, it's really interesting to see how the area of other countries compares.

http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/

Given how bad kids seem to be at geography, this might not be as interesting or surprising to them, but it raises questions about map scaling that at least I think are worth asking.

How Big Really?

https://thetruesize.com

Enter in your zip code and find out how big something is (environmental disasters, historical events, famous landmarks, and so on) compared to where you live.

Weird Converter

http://www.weirdconverter.com

Conversions to weird units of measurement for volume, length, and weight.