The purpose of this activity is to engage students in using knowledge of basic facts, to solve a problem in context.
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 class of 24 students is planning a camping trip.
The school has tents that fit three people each and backpacks that can be shared one between two students.
The teacher wants the class to be split into cooking groups that will be as small as possible so that everyone sharing a tent will be in the same cooking group.
Also, each pair of students sharing a backpack will need to be in the same cooking group.
How many students will be in each cooking group? Explain how you arrived at your answer.
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 creates a diagram to allocate students to cooking groups the contain tent trios and backpack pairs.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student calculates the smallest cooking group numbers using common multiples of two and three.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/camping-groups at 8:51pm on the 26th February 2024