Team Enterprise 3 Act Math
- aielloc
- Jan 29, 2020
- 3 min read
This week Team Enterprise was challenged with a 3 Act Math Task. This process, created by Dan Meyer, asks students to take ownership and engage in the problem they are solving. I will include the Ted Talk by Dan Meyer explaining 3 Act Math at the end of this post if you're interested in learning more (its incredible).
The general framework for 3 Act Math is as follows: first, students are shown a visual or video. Next, they generate as many questions or observations as they can related to that visual (preferably mathematical in nature). The group selects one question to focus on from their list. From there they determine an estimate that would be too low and too high, then come up with their own estimate. After that the group generates questions related to what data they need to know to solve the problem-additional information. Once that information has been established, either through research or provided to the students, learners determine strategies they'll use and began calculations.
Our 3 Act Math task started with this video:
Students generated the questions below and selected their focus question, "How many pennies can be stacked in the cube".
Next we talked about too low and too high reasonable estimates to help each student come to their own estimation of how many pennies can be stacked in the cube. From there groups discussed what they needed to know to solve their focus questions. See video below to listen in on some of those conversations:
Here are the need to know questions they came up with (the circled numbers are from later once we'd answered those questions):
We found out the dimensions of the cube and a penny. From there we had large and small group discussions on strategies we could use to answer: How many pennies in a stack? How many stacks in the cube? This was a perfect opportunity to connect division with a decimal divisor to an authentic question that students were invested in answering. Students then began calculations and we collaborated to work through them once everyone had given it a shot.
Some groups started by finding how many stacks could fit in a cube, others how many pennies in a stack. Given our found information they could use division (ex. 6in divided by .75in to find how many stacks fit in a row/column). Students could also use (6in divided by .06in to find out how many pennies were in a stack). Some learners used repeated addition or multiplication guess and check. This resulted in great math conversations around order of steps, strategies for solving, efficiency, and calculation accuracy).
We ended up agreeing as a group that there were 64 stacks in the cube and each stack held 100 pennies. As we watched the final video (where solution is revealed) we realized our answer of 6400 total pennies was 256 less than theirs of 6656. We asked students to discuss why that might be (with the caveat that the calculations we did as a class was accurate).
See one of these collaborative conversations below:
As a whole group we realized that our penny dimensions for thickness said "about" .06 inches. When Mr. Pollard looked further we found the "actual" thickness of a penny to be .0598 inches. He read that number to students without showing it visually as five hundred ninety-eight ten-thousandths. We further explored how we would write that number in standard form and how such a minute difference could create a difference of 256 pennies.
Great work Team Enterprise! We saw engagement, perseverance, flexible thinking, collaboration, clear communication, student directed learning, and content mastery all happening throughout this process.
If you're interested, check out Dan Meyer's Ted Talk explaining where 3 Act Math came from and why it is an effective approach to learning and instruction.
Thanks for reading!
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