The purpose of this activity is to engage students in solving a problem using measurement and arithmetic techniques.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
A teacher has set her class the task of ‘walking the length’ of State Highway 1 in 50 school days. They are allowed to count each step that each student takes if they walk to and from school and if they walk laps of the 400 m track on the school field at fitness time.
Use the data the class have collected below, to work out how many laps of the track each student will need to walk on each of the 50 challenge days.
Eleven students walk to school and back home every day. Each walker used a gps app on a smartphone to measure their walk to school. the results are:
250, 186, 373, 1256, 812, 280, 140, 203, 95, 413, 77
The class ‘Googled’ the length of State Highway 1 and got 2 047 km.
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student uses appropriate calculations to solve a measurement problem involving proportional reasoning.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student finds the solution to a proportional reasoning problem in a measurement context.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/50-day-challenge at 8:51pm on the 26th February 2024