In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.
I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).
This student submission comes from my former student Brianna Horwedel. Her topic: working with the half-life of a radioactive element.
How can this topic be used in your students’ future courses in mathematics or science?
Half-Life of radioactive elements in Pre-calculus is generally used when introducing exponential decay. However, its main application is in the field of Chemistry and Archeology. If students go on to take any type of chemistry, they will definitely learn more about the half-life of radioactive elements and how long it takes to get rid of certain nuclear elements. The half-life of Carbon-14 is especially important in Archeology. Carbon-14 dating is a method used to determine the age of archeological artifacts of a biological origin using the half-life of Carbon-14. This process can date bone, wood, cloth, plant fibers, and more that are up to 50,000 years old. The way it works is as follows: as soon as a living organism dies, it stops taking in new carbon. The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 is the same as every living thing. However, when an organism dies, the carbon-14 starts decaying with its half-life of 5,700 years. The carbon-12 does not decay. When an organism is found, they look at the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 to determine the age based on the half-life of carbon-14.
How could you as a teacher create an activity or project that involves your topic?
I think this topic lends itself nicely to a project. Firstly, I would come up with several half-lives and place them in a bowl. Each student would pick a half-life and have to make up an element. Using poster-board, they would give a brief description of what their element is and then create a graph illustrating their particular half-life. They would then present it to the class explaining how they graphed their line and what equation they used. They could also include a table of input and output values. This would be a great refresher on graphing exponential decays along with allowing a little creativity. I think the students would have a lot of fun with this type of project.
How can technology be used to effectively engage students with this topic?
I found this really great web-site (https://jeopardylabs.com/play/exponential-growth-decay) that has an exponential growth and decay form of Jeopardy. It allows you to pick how many teams there are and then it sets up a Jeopardy board. This would be a really fun way to review at the end of a unit over exponential growth and decay. To make the students more engaged, I would offer extra credit to the team with the highest score at the end. Because it is in a game form, students are more likely to pay attention to this type of review.
Mean Green Math 