MODEL-DEVELOPMENT
SEQUENCE PART III:
DELIVERY
ROUTES AND THE MATHWORLDSä EXPLORATION
Michelle Heger
Purdue University
This poster presentation is the third of a four-part sequence that describes Model-Eliciting and Exploration Activities. This poster presents a Model-Eliciting Activity that requires students to develop a model that describes relationships among distance, rate, and time to create reasonable delivery routes. It also presents a follow-up Model Exploration Activity that has students explore position versus time and velocity versus time graphs.
A Model-Eliciting Activity asks students to develop a mathematical model that describes, explains, manipulates, or predicts the behavior of a real world system. Students are given a problem statement that presents the students with a real-world problem that needs to be solved for an identified client. Typically, the client asks the students to describe how the client can use the students’ solutions in the future to solve similar problems. A Model-Exploration Activity is a follow-up activity for the Model-Eliciting Activity. The Exploration Activity allows the students to explore patterns, regularities, traditional mathematical notations, and different representational systems that further develop the models that they constructed in the Model-Eliciting Activity.
The
Rush Popcorn Delivery Model-Eliciting Activity asks the students to prepare
delivery routes according to the constraints of means of transportation,
location, and time for orders of holiday popcorn. The Model-Exploration
Activity uses SimCalc MathWorldsä to
simulate the path of a jeep along a delivery route. By exploring this simulation students examine the relationships
among the several variables to extend the models they first constructed.