Inquiry Project

Unit: Word Problems

Present Issue: When will the world run out of food?

Question: Apocalypse is about us, Zombies run free, food is very short. Our classroom is one of the few groups that survived, we have 1200 pounds of food left, assume each person consumes 1.5 pounds a day to stay healthy, we have 20 people in our classroom. How many days will we have enough food before we have to scavenger for more?

Lesson One:

One class period.

Grabber: Students run into an empty classroom desks are a mess pushed up to windows/ edges of room. Random food items scattered across the room.  Students see sign on board that says “Sit on floor.” Teacher runs in with beat up newspaper exclaiming that the apocalypse has happened, but the class has survived. Teacher explains how it happened: Food Shortages, zombies, Nuclear bombs… Teacher explains that the food left in the room is the food left for the whole class to eat. Today’s task: Read a fictional article about the apocalypse then  add up all of the food in the room to see how much food we have to work with, take whole class period.

Overview: Students can connect math with seemingly real world math problems. In this lesson the students would be working with adding multiple decimals together to come up with the total amount of food left.

Debriefing: Tell students to be careful out there as they leave, keeping up the act, tell them to come back from their scavenge safe!

Next class period:

Students have to create a formula to solve how many days the students all together will last on the food supply they are given.

Answer: 1200/1.5= 80 pounds per day….  80/20 people= 40 days till food runs out. So (1200/1.5)/20= how many days

Overview: Students know this day how to connect problems to the real world, students also learn how to gather together a formula to solve for how many days.

Debriefing: With the bell about to ring explain that the government has come to save them! For them to run free!