Mairead's Reflection:
I had sent them away with the first two questions on this for Monday. In class we started by having a student show their solutions on the document camera. We then talked briefly about what domain and range were - one student asked what the difference between that and listing the input and output values were on the last activity - we decided that when we listed all the possible input values that was exactly the same as the domain! Then they got working on the activity and we talked a little about what they had come up with at the end. We got a little bogged down on the second example (the linear one about year and sales) - trying to decide if we should put in years since 1990 or the actual year (we decided on the actual year) and then how we would figure out all the possible outputs here. I was actually wishing that I had not chosen to talk about that one at the end of class as I think it would have been much better if I had done what I first intended which was to send them away with the end of that activity so they would have had to think a little bit harder by themselves before we discussed it - I think it could have been a much better discussion if I had done that.
We came back in on Wednesday and talked about a couple of more questions that they wanted to figure out. Particularly the last one "Height as an individual ages" and we tried to figure out which should be the input and output. We decided that with age as input and height as output then it was a function but we also noticed that if we switched and made height input and age output it wouldn't be a function - I think about half the class actually understand this really well at this point as we're having really good conversations around these discussion points.