With my grade 9 Math Applied class, I have been so lucky to have such a great class that I really wanted to something different with them, instead of having them just sitting at their desks and working on textbook questions. We were on the topic of adding and subtracting polynomials and I wanted to assess them, but instead of a paper and pen type of assessment, I wanted to get them moving around and creating discussions with the classmates. So, I had created a class challenge. They were to put the pieces of a polynomial puzzle together. Each student had one puzzle piece with both a question and answer and had to go find someone else and see if their puzzle piece matched.
Here's the outcome!
To help start them off so they knew what the final puzzle should look like (a triangle), I did put the corner pieces and draw a layout. The students did stick their pieces together on the board.
Thoughts on the activity: Definitely a great activity, great way to assess the students, especially since I was able to hear the discussions going on, and it was really nice to see the students helping each other out as well when students couldn't find where they should place their puzzle piece.
Program: If you want to try out this activity, you can make your own puzzle, and there's different layout, with the program Tarsia. Here's the link to download the program: http://www.mmlsoft.com/index.php/products/tarsia
Since I love the activity and could see the students really enjoyed it as well, I decided to do this activity again with them, but this time, they were to complete the puzzle on their own, so they could keep it. But this time it was focuse on multiplying monomials and polynomials. You can check out my tweet for more photos of the outcome
