IMP Overland Trail - Getting the Gold

I skipped Getting the Gold when I taught Overland Trail last year. I am so sad that I did! This is such a cool activity because it has such real-world applications. In this activity the students are asked to compare the profits of 2 different ways to gather gold. While discussing this activity it is fun to bring up discussions about making business decisions.

The discussion points that are a part of this activity include:

1. Business start up costs
2. Profit
3. Breaking even
4. BONUS...This is the first activity where the starting point is negative so it is fun to watch the students say..."the starting point is negative this time!" 

**I still catch myself wanting to give the student too many hints. I am sometimes excited about how the activities bring in different aspects and I just want to point them out! HAHA!

This activity and Water Conservation are fun "wrap-up" activities that have the students once more create graphs and answer questions. I love to ask questions like:

How do you know how much profit they had on Day 7 according to the graph?

Now, how can you answer that same question using the rule we created?

Could you use a table to answer that same question? 

 

IMP Cookies - Profitable Pictures...very important

This activity builds off of Picturing Pictures. Mrs. New and I decided to draw a graph for Picturing Pictures and make copies of it so the students would for sure have an accurate graph on which to do their "profit lines." It is so wonderful to "share a brain" with Sonya (Mrs. New) because she has already taught Cookies twice. We are needing to trim as much as possible because we started the curriculum late. Therefore she knows when there is an activity that you should not skip and I need to remember NOT TO SKIP PROFITABLE PICTURES.

This activity gives students the tools they need to answer the Cookies unit problem. The students should discover that the profit lines are parallel and that the higher the y-intercept the higher the profit. Therefore they need to extend their parallel lines until they find the highest line that clips a point in the feasible region. After trying to get my students to explore this activity over 2 different days I finally EXPLICITLY told them that the maximum profit is going to come from one of the corners (if you will) of the feasible region. Sonya and I  also EXPLICITLY told them that the methods we used to discover the feasible region for Profitable Pictures are the same as what they need to use to solve the Cookies problem.

Profit Lines...

When I first started the curriculum I was so diligent to read through the teacher's guide for almost every lesson. So far this semester I have not been able to do that! It is a long story... Anyway, I really value having someone (who just happens to share a planning period with me) to collaborate and discuss lessons with! It makes such a difference. Sonya is totally committed to our "new curriculum" and we have so many aha moments that we get to share with each other.