Which movie rental service should you choose?
Loved this! The "joke" of the museum was somewhat lost on my kids, and they actually answered Question 5 pretty well when we were still on Question 2. But generally, they were engaged and interested and this was so much richer than a typical introduction, even when it's a "real world" scenario. The lesson is a wonderful lead-in to needing algebraic methods to solve, which we will tackle in the coming days. We'll get to Datelines in a week or so when we move from equations to inequalities. One small hangup: for weaker students, the graph scales on the second page really threw them. When I do this again I will make a different grid, so that while we focus on the concepts of systems we don't get lost in the details of counting out slopes. But, as always, I loved the lesson. Thank you.
by You
Oops -- and I should add: so did my students!
by You
Thanks for sharing this, Jennifer! Can't wait to hear how Datelines goes!
by Ginny Stuckey
My kids actually loved the Blockbuster video, but in a surprisingly nostalgic way for 14-year-olds. Disappointingly, though, they were not that into the comparison of plans. They were just all so vehemently certain right from the start that Netflix was best, period! The idea of only renting a few movies (or TV shows) a month was so foreign to them it seemed irrelevant. Several brought up Amazon Prime as being a more relevant comparison, for what it's worth. I might be able to "sell" it better next year now that I can anticipate their reactions.
by You
Hi, Julie. Thanks for the feedback. Like your students', my default would probably be to assume that Netflix was the best, too. However, my mom was in town this weekend. She's super into baseball -- go Nats! -- and wanted to watch a baseball-related movie, so we checked Netflix. "Eight Men Out?" No. "The Natural?" Nope. Surely they'd have "A League of Their Own," right? Strike three! In the end, we rented "The Rookie" on Apple TV and got pumped for spring training. Best $5 I ever spent.
by Karim Ani
One of the best lessons so far!!! My students and I loved this one and the real life applications jumped off of the page for them. This group of students (8th graders) understood the humor behind the Blockbuster museum since we had a Blockbuster in our town but they needed help with the Virgin records and Borders bookstore references. I used this as a culminating lesson with my instructional support class and loved that they could complete the task with minimal coaching :D They got it!
by vivian scavo
Flick$ worked great as a culminating lesson to the graphing method that fueled a need for the substitution/elimination method for solving linear systems. I changed the 5th question to ask the students for any thoughts/questions about their solutions to the system and put these on the board during the summary (without answering any of them). Some great questions were "is the solution negative? It doesn't ever intersect? How can I find out their exact value from the graph?". Using these questions to fuel the next lesson, we looked for equality in both equations and found the exact solutions using the substitution method.
by You