Keeping It Real

While our learners certainly dedicate loads of time mastering fundamental math algorithms and formulas, it's equally important that we provide them with opportunities to apply their knowledge and understanding of these skills in real-life math scenarios. Designing learning experiences that require the application of mathematical concepts pushes learners to think deeper about math, allowing them to see the connections while offering meaningful context for their learning. As we often say in The Hive, "We're keeping it real". The goal of our math learning experiences is aimed at doing just that and this week's guest bloggers are excited to explain the value in it. Enjoy.

The pizza fractions activity really helped me learn how to work through the struggle of math. When it got challenging, I stopped and took a deep breath, and then went back to it. There were a lot of different steps and a lot of different types of math that I needed to use to work through the activity. It was really fun and I hope we can do something like this again.  - Kiwi222

Fractions are important in the real world. For instance, if you want to expand the size of a building, you would have to multiply the length and width, which always includes a mixed number.  - M&M

Pretend you are driving home on a Friday night. You have four kids in the car and you are thinking about ordering a pizza, but all of your kids like different toppings. If you know how many slices are in the pizza and how many slices each kid will eat, you can ask for specific toppings on fractional parts of the pizza.  - TheBeeGuy101

Real builders have to multiply and divide fractions all the time when they are building (just like we did for our pizza parlor remodel projects). Knowing how to multiply and divide fractions will come in handy for doing jobs like this.  - Lonnie & Giraffe 

I think it is important to involve real-world situations in our math experiences because if we don't, then when we get into the real world, we will be overwhelmed and not know which types of math will help us solve certain problems.  - Swagger25

Understanding fractions is extremely important because in the real world you don't always work in whole numbers. Sometimes you need to work with parts of a whole - like our pizzeria remodel projects.   - Waterbottle1

Connecting our math experiences to the real world is important. For example, if a recipe calls for, let's say 1/4 cup of flour, but you need to double the recipe, you would need to know how to multiply that amount by two (or know how to do repeated addition of fractions). If you didn't know how to do this, the recipe would come out completely wrong!   - Moon_Drop