Popcorn Pandemonium 3 act Task

In MFM2P today we were looking at solving a system of equations. Rather than starting with words today we used the popcorn pandemonium videos.

We noticed and wondered lots of things as we watched the video. Many groups noticed the timer, and how they each ate popcorn differently.

When watching act 2 it took a bit of time, but we eventually could piece together that they were eating in a pattern.

Groups had some productive struggle as they created tables of values, and then put the information onto a graph.

We consolidated and noticed how we could have made equations to show the same information, and used them to calculate intersection points that may occur off the graph.

Here’s act 3 which we watched to see if we had correctly determined the popcorn they would have eaten when the timer elapsed.

Students were very engaged in graphing to solve this problem. I wonder if there’s a problem where they would gravitate to solving with equations instead.