null

Math Battle

Catapult contest combines learning and fun for students at one.Lodi

 

Students in Darrell Wildt’s class at one.Lodi used rubber band-powered catapults to hurl tiny beanbags across their classroom at castles made from construction-paper building blocks.

Each team of four had its own castle to build and protect. Teams piled up stores of the castle-toppling beanbags used as ammunition by correctly answering math questions. The questions required students to solve quadratic equations.

But the classroom battle had more than this math behind it.

Each team had the same amount of construction paper to use to build their castles. Wildt gave the students parameters, then let them loose to calculate the surface area that would give them the most castle with the available paper.

It was an exercise in perseverance and problem solving.

Students customized the tiny catapults. They tested and re-tested them before Game Day, and they were encouraged to use any of the knowledge and skills they had learned over the past year to plug in their results into a spreadsheet so they could increase the accuracy of their future attacks.

Along the way, they learned more about the math behind the arch traveled by projectiles and some history about warfare and history.

The classroom exercise at the end of the school year was more than a review of the math they had learned. It linked the students to other areas of study.

And they had a great time while doing it.

Posted: 7/28/2015