(NB. I haven’t fiddled to work out what to do with this yet, but found this very thing on Desmos here (Tasty fruit)
There’s another desmos page called ‘Pomegraphit bag of chips activity‘ that links with these ideas too?
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Adapted from Dan Meyer’s session at the 2014 love learning conference, this lesson forms a good introduction to ‘Straight Line Graphs’ – in particular the opening to the year 8 curriculum material on understanding the number plane / Cartesian plane. (see below for additional desmos task)
- Begin the lesson with asking students for names of different fruits – type them up in a list for future reference
- Then ask the students to rank them (say 1-12 for a dozen fruits) – no more information given at this stage. May need to ‘google images’ some of the different fruits!
- Discuss answers / extremes of most tasty/least tasty etc.
- Next show them the image of the axes. Discuss meaning of ‘quadrant’ and label the 4 quadrants.
- Ask them to now work with a partner to put their fruit into quadrants (can either just put in a quadrant generally or specifically in a part of the quadrant – work towards this discussing scale etc)
- Fuel discussions along with debates/exploring meanings etc. Could also ask ‘if you were a fruit, which quadrant would be the best/worst to be in’ etc). Could also show someone else’s example to compare:
This task can be extended by asking them to create/share their own version of the task. Could possibly show them the example of the movie stars – see link for this and more (incl. most of above!) here
NB. Here’s a nice image I found later that ties together some concepts here, as well as a good chat about the value of maths!
NB> perhaps something to go with this/build on with computers is Nathan Kraft’s desmos activity.