The following projects were created by UTeach PBI students following content guidelines of either the second or fifth 6th weeks of the Austin Independent School District's scope and sequence.
*** Design a neighborhood: The students will be working in groups throughout a four-week PBI unit centered around designing a block for a new neighborhood being built in a city. In the final artifact the students will create a blueprint design of a block of this new neighborhood, consisting of four buildings. These four buildings will have set specifications defined in the attached rubric for the final artifact. These specifications will be dictated by specifications of surface area, volume, and similarity. Students will also be required to operate within a specified budget while designing their neighborhoods.
http://neighborhooddesignpbif2014.weebly.com/
*** Car Trip: The students are planning for a senior road trip to five different cities across the United States. They will plan which car to purchase, the expenses involved in the road trip, and the time the trip will last.
http://sites.google.com/site/pbicartrip20102/
*** Fun Vacation: The goal of the project is to plan financially for an international trip. Students will choose a country of interest to visit, and build an itinerary around the activities in which they wish to partake. Students will calculate total costs using linear functions and decide how much money they must save for how long in order to take their trip.
https://sites.google.com/site/pbifunvaction20102/home
*** Light bulbs good for the environment or your wallet? Students will test different light bulbs to learn about plotting equations and to determine which types are the best for both the environment and which are the cheapest."
https://sites.google.com/site/pbienergyefficient20109/home
*** Classroom Crime Scene Investigation: In this project, students will gather data, including height, shoe size, wingspan, stride length, and length of their forearm, in order to create linear equations that will help them identify a criminal from crime scene evidence.
https://sites.google.com/site/pbi20112/
*** Best Car Choice: In the Best Choice project, students will explore and investigate the properties of linear functions. The project has been created to engage students by having them compare different cars using linear functions to ultimately give a mathematical justification for a chosen car.
https://sites.google.com/site/pbibestcaroption20122/
*** Robot Quarterback: The Robot Quarterback project is a great way to get students interested in learning quadratics. The project has students use quadratics to model the trajectory of a football thrown by a Robot. They will program the robot using the quadratic that best models real-life football plays.
https://sites.google.com/a/utexas.edu/cayer_levin_robotqb/\
*** Austin Food Trailer: This is a two week Algebra I project where students use slope, linear functions, and graphs to help create a business plan that answers the driving question: "How can I ensure that my fundraising food trailer is highly successful?"
https://sites.google.com/site/pbifoodtrailer20122/
*** Let's Make Some Money! This 3 week project-based mathematics lesson requires students to create linear equations and graphs, focusing on the properties of slope and intercepts to model the sales of CDs and online music. Students will design and present a sales plan explaining their position and providing mathematical justification in the form of linear equations and graphs based on collected data.