Improper fractions and scale, on a warm summer day - The Education Report - Katy Murphy's blog on Oakland schools

Improper fractions and scale, on a warm summer day - The Education Report - Katy Murphy's blog on Oakland schools:

Improper fractions and scale, on a warm summer day

By Katy Murphy
Friday, July 13th, 2012 at 11:14 am in Uncategorized.

photo by D. Ross Cameron/Bay Area News Group

On a hot (by Oakland standards) summer afternoon this week in Oakland’s Sobrante Park neighborhood, a group of almost 50 soon-to-be middle schoolers were in the thick of problem solving at their local school.

I mean, check out that whiteboard!

The topic was measurement and scale, a concept that’s fundamental to our lives — and to the work of engineers, architects and planners — but sometimes difficult for kids to wrap their minds around.

To demonstrate the pitfalls of creating small-scale models with inexact measurements, Ryan Patrick O’Neill, an Oakland math teacher, pulled up an ancient map of the world