Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sean Dardis, Dave Mills, and Betty Sundling to the Video Story Problem channel over on Vimeo! They earn the award for “most courageous teachers of the week” in my book for taking the first step in exploring how to make math a little more engaging, and a bit more relevant to students. The three are all 6th grade math teachers in Mattawan, and while they’ve always done a fantastic job...

In my never ending quest to find an engaging way to bring the real world into the classroom, I captured some video of my children and I playing with one of those massive rolling granite sphere water fountains. I’ve never really been intriqued by the tiny little desktop versions of these fountains, where a small amount of water is able to “float” a tiny granite sphere the size of a baseball, and then allow it to rotate...

I’ve been not so secretly trying to experiment with video, “real world math”, and how to turn a mainstay of modern mathematics instruction (the story problem) into real life examples of how you can use even the most elementary, or complex math, in your everyday experiences. And as of yesterday, I’ve got some help! The awesome elementary teachers over at the Engaging Educator’s blog have started to submit their...

Peace and Quiet by techsavvyed It’s the 4th of July here in the United States, a day to celebrate our independence, our freedom, but mostly in modern America what we celebrate is enjoying a little summer relaxation before the big fireworks show at night. Here’s a brief sound effect story for your ears that hopefully conveys my attempts to relax today. All of the sounds were captured by myself with the aid of my 19 month old...

It just occurred to me this evening that while I’ve been creating and posting a video story problem every week or so for the last few months, I haven’t really put them all in one place yet. Which is a shame really, as I think they’re actually getting better…..at least, I hope they are. I’ve managed to settle on a nice simple way to end most of the videos, by asking the questions “How do you set up the...

This is perhaps my most ambitious and difficult to assemble video story problem yet. Which has me seriously conflicted, as it also feels like one of the most traditional, and least inquiry-based story problems. It feels like nothing more than just a “fluffy” version of a typical text based story problem taken straight from a Calculus 1 textbook. However, given the nature of Khan Academy’s very rote problems that exist only...