Who's The Daddy?

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Today, students solved the most ridiculous problem I've ever written.

We've been working on writing exponential functions given 2 points and an asymptote the past couple of days in IM3. I wanted students to understand how useful models can be (they give us an equation we can plug values into).

When students came in today, I gave them each a "case file" from "my lawyer friend" who wants their help in a case.

Inside there were the following:

  • a letter
  • 2 plane tickets
  • a patient lab chart
  • a fake Wikipedia article


Students then worked on solving for an exponential equation to model Amanda's HCG level using the information on the patient chart to create this, along with the info from Wikipedia to know that the asymptote is k=5. They can then use the exponential to work backwards and solve for the date of implantation (Feb 11), subtract 8 days to get the date of conception (Feb 3), and then subtract a couple more days to get the day of the affair (Feb 1). They check the plane tickets and see that the husband was out of town that day.

After, students collaborated on a google doc to write a "report" to submit to the judge, which had to include a desmos graph with labelled points. Here is one group's:




Students loved it! It was very engaging and silly, and they liked learning how models can be used. I also created a scaffolded sheet but didn't end up using it because students didn't need it.


Here's all the links if you want to do this with your own classes!





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