11/5 First MOEMS Day

I went back and forth on what to do today. Initially I had been thinking about exploring truchet tiles. I’ve found some starter points on chalkdust but the questions are fairly free form and I’d prefer some more ideas about investigation points.  (I’m pretty sure everyone will have fun making patterns regardless of this)  But then in the middle of thinking this through, the first MOEMS test was released a week early. Originally, I thought it wouldn’t be available until next week when we’re doing AMC8 and then I was planing to squeeze it in before the second one released in December. As a result, I decided to do it now. The hope was it would serve as a gentle warmup for next week and we would generate some  good whiteboard discussions.

Overall, I’m fairly happy with going down this route. My only worry being its back to back with AMC8 next week and I will definitely need to compensate with something completely different and very non competitive in the following weeks.  I can’t directly discuss the questions (which makes for a less compelling blog post) but overall I thought was a decent set. The first question was a little bit too computation/order of operations focused for my taste and the last one was an oddly easy logic problem that several kids commented on.    But the middle ones were fairly good and the kids produced multiple strategies to find the solutions. I was also fairly happy with getting most people to demonstrate.  I have 2 more introverted students I’m going to keep working on. They’re both doing good work during the session but reluctant to speak in front of the whole group.

I’m also in the final stages of arranging logistics for next week. Interestingly unlike last year, I’ve had 3 kids from other schools reach out to me to take AMC8 with us. This initially confused the assistant principal when she fielded the first requests.  As of right now I think the host teacher who’s room we use will also proctor for us.

Early Finisher’s Puzzle (from @mpershan):

Other Planning Thoughts:

I’m considering i I could make a day on Heron’s Theorem work even though many of the kids are pre-geometry.  The idea would be that everyone has covered the Pythagorean Theorem which is all you really need and its fairly cool to see.