Fresh Brownies! A Video Story Problem

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sean Dardis, Dave Mills, and Betty Sundling to the Video Story Problem channel over on Vimeo! They earn the award for “most courageous teachers of the week” in my book for taking the first step in exploring how to make math a little more engaging, and a bit more relevant to students. The three are all 6th grade math teachers in Mattawan, and while they’ve always done a fantastic job of developing strong relationships with students, they’re exploring how they can use media to help connect with the more visual learners that are present in many schools these days.

The main goal of this little video story problem project is to try and bring the real world into the classroom through math, and this brownie problem is a great first step towards that. It’s simple, direct, and tosses in a bit of cheekiness for the students to enjoy. More importantly, it will serve as a great model for when some of their students start creating their own video story problems (I’ve heard rumors of it happening sometime this year). They have a few more videos coming shortly, so please go check them out, and offer some comments on what works for you, and how the videos might be tweaked to offer other angles of attack for students to understand the basic concepts.

I really love bringing these problems into the classroom as it shows the students that the teachers care about them enough to make something just for them, and opens the door for a larger conversation to take place about math, rather than simply solving the problem.