MATH
The lab has been used by teachers of grades 5, 6, 7, 8 to help enhance understanding of difficult, often abstract, math concepts.
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Integers are positive numbers and their opposites. OPPOSITES?!?! How can a number be negative? Have you ever taken an elevator below ground? Grown a tuber in your garden? How about golf, ever hit under par? These are just a few of the many ways negative numbers are used.
Even music classes can use the InDe lab. To ensure that students understood the power of vibrations in making different musical notes the math and science had to be played with. To do this, 7th grade students used glass jars to make the notes to play simple songs. Each jar had to have an exact amount of water in it so the vibrations would have the perfect pitch. They then wrote out the music, including bars and measures so that other students could play their songs correctly enough to be recognized and recorded. Easier said than done!
When learning to break large numbers into their most basic parts (prime factorization), many students memorize the algorithm and can get to an answer, but don't have a clear understanding of what "break down to it's component parts" actually means. What the InDe lab does is help them understand what is really going on with the numbers by looking at something else that can also be broken down into primary components - electronics. As numbers were broken into basic factors in their math class, in the InDe lab students broke down repurposed, donated electronics to their most basic parts - springs, screws, fans etc.
One discussion/reflection that followed comparing prime factorization of numbers to electronics lead to the realization that many other things can be broken down into smaller parts. The students then expanded their understanding by recognizing that if you put basic parts together differently the result will be different.
GEOMETRY
7th grade math students better understand 3D shapes by building triangular prisms using only the materials available to them in the lab.
The enormity of exponential growth is easy to miss when you are just adding 0s to numbers. But when you see that a stomach with 2 bacteria can't harm you, but that when it doubles every second, it won't take long until you are sick. In this case the student uses powers of 2. So he went from 2^2 (4) to 2^3 (8) to 2^4 (16) etc.
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