Some colleagues recently told me about an activity they had used in class called "Math Market". I'm not sure who originally created it. The teacher who shared it with me learned it at a math conference several years ago. I decided to give it a try with a Calculus class that was just finishing up a unit on integration. Here is how the activity is run. Students work in small groups (we had groups of three). Each group starts with $5 and selects a captain who can buy questions of different levels of difficulty from the market. Easier questions cost less and have a smaller profit. More difficult questions cost more and have a higher profit. The captain takes the purchased question back to their group to solve. Once they all agree on a correct solution, the captain returns to the market to sell the solution for a profit. The card is added back to the bottom of the market pile and some other group will have an opportunity to buy it. If their solution is correct, they buy a new question and continue working. If the solution is incorrect, they have to buy the question again to attempt a revised solution (or they can purchase a new question at a different level of difficulty). We decided to purchase the solution at a reduced price ($1 less) if they forgot to include the "+C" at the end for the constant of integration. The easiest questions were free so that if groups went bankrupt with an incorrect solution, they would still be able to "buy" another a problem. I printed the questions on coloured card stock and cut them out. Each question was marked with its level of difficulty. I also added a letter to the card so that it would be easy to find its solution to check the answers. Resources
How it WentI like that students got immediate feedback on their work. If it was wrong, they had to work with their group to correct their mistake. This was a test review for the class so there were lots of different types of problems mixed together and students had to determine what strategy would be best to solve each problem. It is a nice way to introduce some interleaved practice. This activity could be done with nearly any topic but it worked really well for integration as the questions were challenging and took them some time to solve. This made the market area less crowded.
I'm sure there are lots of variations of this activity. If you have some suggestions, I'd love to hear about them. EL
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