Make it Real: Connecting Math to Life Transcript
Peggy Burkins: This lesson is a pre-cal lesson dealing with trig functions.
Raymond James: And we'll be using quad-copters to represent that lesson.
Raymond James: Football coaches come to us and they want to film the games from high above the football field. How high up should we be in order to visually get a good picture of what's going on during the game.
Peggy Burkins: We started with a story and we learned a lot of this because we're thinking Math Train. The brain remembers stories in a way that they don't remember other things. So, if we have a scenario and there's story, and in that story, there's a problem, then it changes the brain in a way so the brain is going to remember forever. So that's what we created. So that kids can actually have this experience they'll never forget. And in the experience, we don't want to have them forget the mathematics of the experience as well. Knowing, this is how I'm going to use this. This is why I'm learning this. And this is how to apply anything I learn. And then be able to defend that.
+++ 00:01:36;25 +++
Student: So, we solve for B. Now we can use this to solve for all of ours. And then we just plug and chug, basically, and we got 89.7'.
Raymond James: Give me a synopsis now.
Student: That's how high we need to be from the center of the field to view the entire field.
Peggy Burkins: We wanted to make it real. So, they ask the question all the time, and he talked about it in the lesson, "when am I ever gonna use this?" So, we wanted to make sure they knew exactly the purpose of the lesson.
Raymond James: Math is real-life application. It's always real-life application. And we tend to forget that. We tend to get caught up in just number-crunching. And being able to do scenarios like this, where you're actually applying it, now it makes sense.
Peggy Burkins: So, we're going to put our glasses on, we're going outside, and we're flying.
Peggy Burkins: These can be as short as a charette - a three-hour strategy - in this case, this is five months long to create this drone. So you can imagine the amount of mathematics you can cover - in the five months - all related to something that the brain is going to remember forever because it's related to something that's real to them, something that's fun, and something that applies all the mathematics that they're learning for them to say, "I have to understand this, because I have to use it in order to complete this lesson that we've been given.
Peggy Burkins: And this is the product, so, well done. Give yourselves a hand.
+++ 00:03:13;23 +++