Mairead's Reflection:
Overall I think it went pretty well! I started with the syllabus and I think I really spent too much time talking there and maybe gave them a few too many details for the first day. I then moved on to the activity and at first there were a few tables where not much discussion was happening and they seemed at a bit of a loss. However pretty quickly most of them came up with some good ideas! I allowed them to go online to google some stuff and I'm regretting that a little - I think they would have done some better thinking if I had left them with nothing other than themselves to turn to - will have to think more about that for next time. Some students collected data and some came up with a proportionality relationship (didn't get a chance to talk about why it would have to be proportional) - no one graphed anything! I'm always surprised that more people don't turn to that! We did get to have a nice conversation about their predictions and the aspects of modeling we need to be careful about. Overall a good first class but wow I'm going to miss having a longer class period - it's really hard to get through this process in 50 minutes! I will need to be really careful with time this semester.
Paula's Reflection:
That was fun and I think gave them a glimpse into trying to make a prediction based upon the trends we see around us (I pointed out that this process is "modeling"). It also got them a little more comfortable with jumping in and trying SOMETHING when they have no idea how to start. They need to be willing to do that in this course. They were very slow to jump in today - there was a lot of staring at each other at the beginning! I did have two groups graph (but they graphed average heights for different shoe sizes rather than just graphing all raw data). Others put all measurement pairs (shoe/ht) into ratios and found an average ratio to use for prediction - ok, that's me pulling their work that was actually all over the place into some semblance of meaning. There were several groups that were ALMOST doing this! At any rate, I did hear one say "well that was fun" as they walked out. Near the beginning of the activity, a couple of people asked if they were going to be graded on any part of the activity. I answered honestly - "no" (I don't always answer that question honestly!) and I think that made them feel less nervous about just trying something.