By definition, place based math activities are activities that use local history, culture, economy, arts, or literature to help students learn more about math.
The instructor indicated that one needs to create situations that are based on local knowledge and understanding. For instance, here in Alaska, I might post a picture of someone standing under a pair of bones that form a parabolic shape. Based on what they see, you might ask students to estimate the height of the bones, or ask them to create a quadratic equation for the parabolic shape.
In another place such as in Colorado, it might be looking at pictures of signs showing the grade of a mountain road with the numbers blacked out and asking students to come up with the grade or perhaps asking them to explain what a 6 percent grade represents in terms of the mountain. Take it a step further by asking them to decide what grade is too steep for a fully loaded truck going uphill.
Something like that wouldn't work well where I live because the only local roads go a few miles inland and there are barely any speed limit signs and no grade signs for certain. But if I asked my students to tell me how long it takes to get to the next town by boat or by snow machine which opens up the possibility of having students create their own word problems.
Another possibility down in the area of the Gulf would be showing a shrimping boat and asking students to estimate the amount of shrimp the boat could hold and what the load could sell for. Up here, it would be taking a picture of a local fishing boat and asking students about the number of salmon it could hold in pounds.
One of my favorite activities for locally based math is to have students recreate a cross section of the local landforms from a topographic map so they can see an outline of something they are familiar with. Once they have the cross-section completed, I ask them to calculate the slope or grade of a few different points on the cross-section.
There are also wonderful mathematical exercises one can do with the differences in daily highs or daily lows over the period of a month for the area. If it's in a colder place, some of the math would involve negatives from start to finish. There is also the possibility of having students calculate the daily average temperature for the month based on data collected by the students every day.
A couple of my freshmen argued they didn't need math at all. I said they did and they should name something that didn't require any math. They promptly suggested they didn't need to know math for when they went out hunting with their guns. This lead to pointing out that they use an intuitive math they've developed over time based on the experience of learning to shoot. I also took time to explain that the calculational math we do in class is what we use to explain how the bullet moves through the air, it's speed, it's trajectory. In other words, we can use mathematical equations to explain the actual firing of a gun.
Again it was something the boys could relate to and introduced the topic of mathematical modeling to explain how things work. I'll take this a step further later but in the next week, I've got some ideas for locally based math to use as warm-ups. Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear. Have a great day.
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