Act 1 - Broken Calculator from Timon Piccini on Vimeo.
If you have never seen nor heard of my broken calculator you can see and hear about it here. Every year I come to this lesson I think, "This is the last year I will do it," and then somehow it becomes the time in my class that gets the most excited about math and problem solving. I tell the story of the calculator, and we jump into using it. Kids get excited by seeing possible patterns, testing their results out, and then I lead them into organization, and predicting. It is essentially an introduction to the scientific method, that leads to some discoveries on the nature of place value. It was one of the lessons that I am most proud of as a teacher, and I do not think it will be leaving my repertoire anytime soon.
This year the palpable response of students to correctly predicting some of the outcomes has been incredible. Literally cheers when they get it right, and boos when I tell them that it is time to stop math class for the day. This is the stuff that makes teaching worth coming back to time and time again.
This year the palpable response of students to correctly predicting some of the outcomes has been incredible. Literally cheers when they get it right, and boos when I tell them that it is time to stop math class for the day. This is the stuff that makes teaching worth coming back to time and time again.
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