And…Liftoff! (Part 1)

I finally launched 😉 our space math curriculum concept to my classes this week!  I’m so excited to start this journey with my students, and I hope it makes my class feel purposeful and connected to the real world.

Part 1:  I am going to give you a brief version of the overview I gave my students.

Part 2 (tomorrow):  I will try to explain how we came up with our idea, because it is not something we came up with overnight.  Our plan is the culmination of months of struggle, compiling ideas, and bouncing ideas between the teachers in our math department to achieve.  Sometimes with these awesome projects/problems/ideas I feel like others may get the impression that you come up with these overnight, but often they are the product of hours of poring through ideas that others do, reading blog posts, collaboration, and lots of sweat and frustration.  My attempt at telling you our process will hopefully help you realize that you can come up with a big scary project like this too!  

Space Themed Algebra 1 Curriculum – 1st Quarter

Here is my attempt at an infographic to explain the first quarter to my students.

My infographic for a space unit in Algebra 1.  If you use this idea, please link back to my blog!

The idea is taking real, past NASA missions, such as Apollo, Voyager, and Mars Odyssey, and analyzing them in the context of my first unit of study.  We can study the distances/rates traveled, graph the mission timeline, discuss timing such as when will the Voyager 1 reach the next star (and solve), and much more!  We will do all of this while reviewing/learning key math topics along the way.

My students will be divided into three groups and given weekly, challenging learning tasks that relate to one of these three missions (but with the same learning goal, such as using a graphing story/piecewise function to describe their mission timeline).  They will study the same mission all the way through the quarter.  As they finish each task, I will discuss and debrief with each group.  Then, they will present their solutions to the other groups so they know what the other missions looked like (kicking their knowledge of that learning target up x3!).

We will continue in this way until we have gotten through all of our learning goals and discussed their missions from many different angles, and then the quarter will culminate in an end-of-quarter project.  In their project, they will have to imagine a completely new NASA mission, and use all of our learning targets to analyze different aspects of the mission, and show their learning in a variety of ways!  I can’t wait to see what they come up with and the gears turning along the way.

I’m also planning on introducing my students to the LAUNCH cycle, based on the book I read over the summer on design thinking in the classroom.  I highly recommend for someone who wants to promote the design process in their class!  Here’s a great intro video if you are interested.  It’s just a great way to give the students the vocabulary to discuss the design process for those who are interested, and has lots of pointers and tips for each step of the process.

I hope this helped explain in a nutshell what we are going for here.  We will definitely have many bumps along the way, but I will try to share our experiences here as much as I can!