Tasks – YouCubed

Origami Tasks with Barbara Pearl

Marti — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 16:41:03 +0000

Integrate origami into your classroom as a tool to teach Geometry using Barbara Pearl’s origami lessons! Barbara’s Ten Teaching Techniques on page 3 will help teachers who may be inexperienced in using origami in a classroom environment be successful inspiring the creative spirit of maths.

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Creating Shells

Marti — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 19:50:48 +0000

This task introduces students to ideas around memory and math, how nature embodies mathematics, and basic connections between rules and visual patterns.

We will use the context of snail/mollusk shells to discover how nature, math, science and storytelling overlap in real and beautiful ways. We have lowered the floor of this task so that students in grades 3-5 can meaningfully interact with these topics in the first part of the task. Alternatively, the ceiling of this task could exit through cellular automata, permutations, Sierpinski’s Triangle, computer coding and more!

This lesson on shell patterns is inspired by material from the book, “The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math,” authored by Manil Suri.

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Playing with Knots

Marti — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 18:53:36 +0000

In this task, students explore the fascinating world of Mathematical Knots, exploring their properties and unique characteristics. Utilizing hands-on activities with strings and collaborating with peers, students will investigate the nature and behavior of different types of knots.

Throughout their exploration, students will interact with key concepts such as the trivial knot, knot deformation, and the 3-colorability rule. This hands-on approach encourages students to engage with the material actively, providing opportunities to enhance their ability for abstract thinking. Never heard of Knot Theory? That’s okay! Our friend Steve Strogatz made a podcast about Knot Theory so you can learn more!

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Sleuthing Slang: A Suspenseful Study of ‘Sus’ 👀

Kristina — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 19:26:07 +0000

In this data talk, we explore modern language trends, particularly Gen-Z phrases. Have you heard of ‘sus’? It’s a trendy word that’s gained popularity, especially in online communities. ‘Sus,’ short for ‘suspicious’ or ‘suspect,’ is used to express doubt or skepticism. Using Google Trends we analyze its popularity over time.

There is a data talk only version and a data talk plus task version of this activity. In the task version of this activity, you can even download the data and investigate yourself.

Data Talk Version (view only, make a copy)

Data Talk + Data Exploration Task (view only, make a copy)

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Exploring Olympic Sports Data

Kristina — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 19:50:15 +0000

In this task, students will have an opportunity to work through the data science process of formulating questions, considering data, analyzing data, and interpreting and communicating. They will do this within the context of Olympic sports. Students will explore qualifying results from gymnastics, diving, and trampoline from the 2021 Olympics. These three sports, though distinct, share a common thread – they are all judged by experts and involve intricate interplays of difficulty and execution scores. By merging them into a unified dataset, students can explore trends that span across these disciplines.

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Julia Robinson Math Festival Puzzles

Suzanne Corkins — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:42:13 +0000

Our friends at the Julia Robinson Math Festival have designed puzzles that are hands-on, play-based, and standards-aligned. Their activities are designed to have a low floor so that anyone can find a way to engage and a high ceiling so that everyone can find a meaningful challenge. You can find them all here, we hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

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March Madness Maths

Suzanne Corkins — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 23:54:25 +0000

Every year a basketball tournament is held across the United States that is called March Madness! The tournament is usually held from March – April each year. It is a women’s and men’s basketball tournament run by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

This year the tournament was especially interesting for us, as we had started to collaborate with a Davidson College mathematician called Tim Chartier. Tim is currently serving as the Distinguished Visiting Professor at MoMath – the Museum of Mathematics in New York. Tim is fascinated by sports analytics and has a great book about data in sports, called Get in the Game. Tim made a video for us that accompanies the task (the link is in the handout), which should interest any student who is learning about probability.

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30 Cubes

Suzanne Corkins — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 22:50:58 +0000

This task is intended to support students building their own identity as a mathematics explorer. They will generate their own data and look for patterns within a sequence. They should work to determine ways to organize their findings so they can make convincing arguments and conjectures. Students are asked to think in cubes by building, drawing, and quantifying their results. “How many different rectangular prisms, which Jo calls cuboids, can you make using 1 cube, 2 cubes, 3 cubes and onwards to 30 cubes?”

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