Lesson Plan - Week Eight - Shelf Brackets Geoboard Lesson

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This lesson is great if you are trying to get students to develop a deeper understanding of the properties of right triangles or trying to get students to use more than one method for finding the area of right triangles. It is also very good for getting students to think deeply about proving that they have found all of the solutions. It is not an easy task to develop and present a convincing argument that one has found all possible solutions to a particular task. This lesson requires that students do this.

Once again, I tested this lesson out on my girlfriend. It worked very well. However, in my opinion, her argument that she had found all possible solutions was weak. Thus, I think the discussion on proving that one has found all possible solutions could take a considerable amount of class time. Also, if students have not been trained on how to develop such an argument throughout the course of a school year then this might be challenging. Thus, in the future, I will try to train my students on how to prove that they have all possible solutions starting in September. Lastly, I feel that requiring students to prove that they have found all possible solutions is very important because it forces students to think like mathematicians.