Yesterday I gave a presentation on self-checking math activities for the 2023 NCTM Virtual Conference. I find presenting at conferences valuable because it makes me reflect on my work and think deeply about why I'm selecting or creating certain activities for the classroom. I thought I was finished with my presentation when I saw a variation of a loop card activity that I decided to give a try. Loop cards make for a great self-checking math activity. In a "loop card" activity, the rectangular cards each have two values or expression on them, much like a domino. Students evaluate the expression on the right of side of the card and find a different card whole value on the left side is equivalent. These cards are then joined together (for example, x+3=7 on the right side of one card would join with x = 4 on the left side of another card). Students continue this way until a loop is created with the cards. For a nice example of loop cards, check out Don Steward's post at https://donsteward.blogspot.com/2015/02/loop-cards.html. The variation on this activity that I saw was NRICH's Doughnut Percents activity. In this activity, four students work as a team. Each student is given four cards and tries to make a small loop (for a total of 16 cards). They will typically not have the correct cards and need to trade cards with other members of the group. When complete, there will be four, four-cards loops created, one for each student. The twist with this activity is that the students have to do this quietly. They can just grab cards from other members of the group, but wait for the other student to give them a card that they need. It is very difficult for students to work together silently. I was inspired by this activity to give it a try with other classes. I created a "Derivative Donuts" activity and gave it a try with a Calculus class to review power, product, quotient and chain rules for derivatives. The google slides file can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lMrJhNWY3jPCqlZrui8EBPe5YeCUdLxt3-akhkGwPxU/edit?usp=sharing. The cards are organized by loop in this file... with a larger group, I would mix the cards up and then have students cut them out... many hands make light work. I used the percent activity above to teach students the rules for the activity using content that they were confident with. Then I gave them the derivative activity which they found challenging. I thought that this activity was a nice change from a typical card sort or question stack type of activity. I like that students worked together as a team to try to create the loops. Because students weren't talking, one student wasn't able to dominate the team and take over the process. Each students had to participate for the group to be successful. The next time I try this activity, I'm going to try having teams of three students with five questions each. I think groups of three might be easier to form small groups (although I'll need more sets of cards). I also recently saw NRICH's Simplifying Doughnut activity which I'm looking forward to try with students. EL
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