Hands-on Activity: Skateboard Flex
Using hands-on activities is a great way to get students involved in learning. Hands-on activities usually consist of a purpose why the students are doing the activity, the materials, a procedure to follow, and then follow-up questions/conclusions students must answer. When doing a hands-on activity its usually requires the teacher to do a lot of planning and preparation before the activity as well as a lot of monitoring during the activity. However, its worth the preparation and time to have students do a hands-on activity. Hands-on activities give the students a different view of the concept rather than just listening to the teacher lecture. Teachers can use hands-on activities to introduce a new lesson or access the students on what they have been learning. Students discover and gain new knowledge through these fun, creative activities.
(This activity is primarily use in grades 6-8, but can be adapted and modified for grades above and below.)
In this activity students will learn how "flex" can be measured through this skateboard flex activity. The students will: describe a real world situation in terms of ratios, perform operations with decimal numbers, will discover the mean of a set of data, will plot a point in a two-dimensional coordinate system given the coordinates, and will relate aspects of a graphical model to the real world situation which is being modeled.