Measurement – Jon Oaks

Scotch Tape and Gas Prices Dilemma

By Jon OaksMay 14, 2011

So, my whole recent obsession with Scotch Tape sort of began a few weeks ago when the following problem popped into my mind... Suppose your boss wants you to buy six 1/2 in x 450 in rolls of Scotch tape at the dollar store (remember the 6% Michigan sales tax). Your boss wants you to use the tape to enclose an area of 3,225.8 square cm, but has only given you a budget of $7.00 to do so, including the amount of gas to drive back and forth to the dollar store, which is exactly 1.5 miles away from work.…

UncategorizedApplication, Gas Prices, Geometry, Measurement, Money, Scotch Tape, Tax

Games, Activities, and Useful Web Tools.

By Jon OaksMar 10, 2011

Here's a rundown of some of the games and activities that I've recently used in the classroom, along with various other useful links that I can see being applicable to learning and education. 1. Ed On Your Own Crossword Puzzles - This particular link from Ed on Your Own has a list of free printable math crossword puzzles for the classroom. Recently I used the One Step Equation Crossword Puzzle and the Two Step Equation Crossword Puzzle with my students. Even the students who were not doing so well with solving equations seem to be doing significantly better after doing these…

UncategorizedActivity, Cell Phone, Desktop Sharing, Equations, Finance, Games, History, I Have Who Has, Integers, Links, Measurement, Proportion, QR Codes, Ratio, Video, Wolfram|Alpha, Worksheets

New Application Problems from the Classroom

By Jon OaksMar 01, 2011

Here are few more problems that I came up with during today's class: 1. Clyde owed 8 different people $4 each for some doughnuts that he bought to eat on his birthday. Then when he wasn't looking, Hellman's stole $4 from Clyde's wallet. In order to reclaim his debt, Clyde needed to split up his total losses over a period of nine months. How much debt will he recover over each of the nine months? 2. Clyde went to the store and he bought seven nuclear weapons, but he doesn't know the price of them yet. He had to return…

UncategorizedApplication, Geometry, Measurement, Money, Statistics

Joliprint, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Teaching Measurement

By Jon OaksFeb 24, 2011

There have been so many times when I have wanted to print something from the web, but have had a very hard time getting it to print out correctly. Joliprint is a resource that will definitely solve (most) of your problems. For example, the other day, I printed this Convert, then Compete blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education with the intent of having my students read the article and then write a paragraph response. By the way, this turned out the be a very good activity that went along with the discussion of measurement in my Developmental Math class. However,…

UncategorizedMeasurement, PDF

Dimensional Analysis Problem

By Jon OaksDec 08, 2010

The other day in my Pre-Algebra class at HFCC we were talking about geometry, but I wanted to link it to the dimensional analysis that we had just done in the previous chapter since I knew that some of the students were struggling with the concept and could probably use the review. So, when the opportunity arose, I came up with a problem off the top of my head. This isn't something that I usually do because I have a hard time being creative under the pressure of standing in front of a room full of students. However, I think…

UncategorizedApplication, Geometry, Measurement