Wednesday, October 27, 2010

WCYDWT: Toast

Funny what you come up with when making breakfast for your kids.

Toaster Question from David Cox on Vimeo.

9 comments:

Dan Meyer said...

Good stuff here. Lemme ask you when you decided on those data points instead of the first four settings.

Dan Anderson said...

Love the kid voices in the background.

Great lead-in to a problem too.

David Cox said...

I really wanted to go with settings 1-4, but they didn't fit the regression. I liked your suggestion re: inserting the bread so that kinda nixed my first draft.

I'm still not exactly sure what would be the best way to do this. Do I want to control the error or do I want things to be as they are. I don't really like the fact that I have setting 7 and then ask for 8. I dunno, should I do one with only two or three settings and not worry about the way it "looks?"

On the second taping, I got all 8 settings so there is still some work I can do here. Almost set off the smoke detectors once again this morning (only got 1-7 as I did't want to wake the house up), so I may take another crack at it.

When do you leave well enough alone? I can see how you burn a bunch of time with this stuff; It's pretty fun.

Anonymous said...

Can you comment the data for the other settings? I want to see everything. I've got a couple of ideas why this wouldn't be perfectly linear.

Dr. Hartmann said...

Really interesting reflective moment -- I love the illustration of how mathematical literacy helps you to see (or ask) questions that others would never thing about.

Pam Richmond said...

Very interesting and well-constructed. The lack of a narrator is great! I hope you will become more addicted to 'burning a bunch of time' with videos, David.

David Cox said...

hillby All the rest of the settings (except 6 which was 2:40) can be found here.

Unknown said...

I am new to all this bloggin' stuff and could not find a contact you spot . . . so I am leaving a comment. I just gave your toaster problem to my sophomore algebra II class. I was at a math conference and my sub actually administered the problem. Here was the sub comment. . . "They were awesome! They worked hard and were anxious to see who would win the candy!" (OK I cheated a little I randomly paired them to work on the problem and bribed them with a candy bar to the team that could come closest to the actual answer with sound mathematical reasoning) Can I have your permission to publish my results from your problem on my blog? So far just thumbing through them they look pretty decent. In fact they look like they really put in some hard work. Many used geogebra to plot the data, but from the papers I can tell that there was a ton of function slope, and linear equation talk. All good things and the candy wouldn't have been needed to motivate them to do it, I was just feeling guilty that I abandon them again.

David Cox said...

Dan
Use it all. Post a link to your write up, if you don't mind.