Making Math Mobile: Running & Rates

B2. Operations

B2.1 use the properties and order of operations, and the relationships between operations, to solve problems involving whole numbers, decimal numbers, fractions, ratios, rates, and percents, including those requiring multiple steps or multiple operations

When I was in my last placement in the faculty of education I taught students the differences between ratios and rates and the different kinds of real life scenarios in which we would use these (e.g. recipes, speeds, etc.) 

One thing to know about this class, while math may not have been the favourite subject of most students, they loved moving around and they loved their gym time, so I thought to myself “What better opportunity to get them moving and learning at the same time!” 

So, to incorporate my student’s competitive nature into their math education, I decided to plan a race! Here’s what the students had to do:

-Make a group of 3 or 4 

-Students had to answer two prediction questions before they could go down to the gym and start their races. The questions asked them to predict who would be the fastest in their group and why, and to predict the rates of speed everyone would run. 

-Once they were in the gym, they would run either 10 or 20 meters with one groupmate responsible for stopping the timer, and another for documenting the results, each student would get 3-5 attempts depending on what they were comfortable with doing. 

-They also were able to run for 10 seconds and measure how far they ran in that time using the 10m and 20m marks as a baseline.

(Doing this gave students examples of rates where the first term was an easy number to do calculations with, and one where the second term was an easy number to do calculations with)

-Afterwards, students had rates with how many seconds it took them to run 10 or 20 meters and rates of how far they could run in 10 seconds. Students had to take their best attempt and convert the rate to m/s (number of meters per second to be precise)

- Students then had to make a ratio of their m/s rates amongst their group. 

-Students then look back at their predictions and see if they were correct and make any notes of the differences and similarities. 

As one final piece to this task, I reviewed all the students' time and announced to the class the top three runners in the group with the fastest speeds. 

When I was running this activity, I noticed how some of my students who were not the most engaged in class were actively participating in this activity because the math became enjoyable to them when paired with an activity. 

While I certainly am always looking for areas to improve in, and can admit that this activity may not have been perfect, I do think it was a fun break from the classroom that many of my students in that class needed.