Caitlyn Tucker is a teacher who had the awesome idea of having her students do a scanvenger hunt using Instagram while on their field trip to China Town in San Francisco. The intention was to have students further explore culture during their unit of study on China in their Global Studies class. The use of social media combined with exploration and genuine intrigue no doubt makes this a very engaging activity. As such it has prompted to me to think of a way I would be able to implement a similar activity in my own classroom. The initial issue that comes to mind is my content area. Math isn't exactly to go explore in the world and take pictures of unless I was able to get extra creative. Additionally, units in mathematics are often limited to a specific topic. For example, right now in my Algebra II class, my students are learning about sequences and series. As much as I would like for them to search for applications of sequences and series in the real world, something tells me there are limits to that. Even without those limits, merely taking pictures would either end up being repetitive or a non-contributor to actually learning the math. I say this however with hesitance as I believe you make anything useful and engaging with enough creativity.
With this in mind I would modify it slightly for an idea of my own for a localized scavenger hunt. An important concept in our unit right now is finding either specific terms or sums of Arithmetic and Geometric sequences. Hence, I think it it would be interesting for groups of students to receive clues in a scavenger hunt that double as related math problems. They would have to solve the problem as team members for increasingly challenging problems to reveal an answer that leads to the next clue (For example, a term value that represents a classroom number). Student's will then instagram their groups, solution, or the next clue and hash tag the unique name of the scavenger hunt. I'm sure there are better ideas out there somewhere for a math related scavenger hunt, but off the top of my head, the potential for learning is certainly there!
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With this in mind I would modify it slightly for an idea of my own for a localized scavenger hunt. An important concept in our unit right now is finding either specific terms or sums of Arithmetic and Geometric sequences. Hence, I think it it would be interesting for groups of students to receive clues in a scavenger hunt that double as related math problems. They would have to solve the problem as team members for increasingly challenging problems to reveal an answer that leads to the next clue (For example, a term value that represents a classroom number). Student's will then instagram their groups, solution, or the next clue and hash tag the unique name of the scavenger hunt. I'm sure there are better ideas out there somewhere for a math related scavenger hunt, but off the top of my head, the potential for learning is certainly there!
(Click HERE for the article)