There have been a lot of changes since I last blogged in May 2016. I have switched jobs and started teaching in different school district, where I began teaching a new course for me, AP Statistics, and had three preps. My new school also has a different schedule that I had to get accustomed to: my planning period alternates every other day, half of my classes are on a block schedule, the other half are on an A/B modified block schedule. I really love where I'm teaching, what I'm teaching, and my schedule, but it was a lot of changes in a short amount of time.
On top of that, my husband and I sold our previous home and bought a new house. Now I don't have a lot of time because I'm working on completing my National Board Certification and decided to start doing Standards Based Grading with my students. Which is A LOT of work the first year!
That's enough of a tangent, I'll actually get to my post about comparing slopes and y-intercepts war.
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After my students played Sarah Carter's @mathequalslove, Evaluating Functions War, they insisted that we play War again. We ended up having a two hour delay on Tuesday because of flooding, so I had time to create a card set for my students to play War again.
We are currently working with linear functions and students needed continued practice with identifying the slope and y-intercept from various representations. So I figured I'd create a set of cards for students to play War and compare slopes and y-intercepts from multiple representations. I ended up created 18 different cards with linear functions.
I printed these pages should that every student had one of the two sets of functions. I printed these on different colors of paper to make it easier to sort out the cards in the beginning of the game. I went ahead and grouped 4 sets of cards together into bags so that it would be easier to distribute the groups.
I then went over the directions for playing War, if needed, see Sarah's general explanation. Here's how I adapted it for these cards and for my students.
1. Distribute the cards to each player. Each player should get 9 cards of a matching color. Each player should shuffle their deck several times.
2. At the beginning of each round and every 3-4 minutes of the game I'd call out "greatest slope wins" or "smallest y-intercept wins." After all, I needed students to practice finding slope and y-intercept, then comparing their values.
3. Each player turns over their card and determines the slope/y-intercept.
4. The player with the highest or lowest (depending on the rules stated out loud), wins every other players' cards. These cards will go on the bottom of their stack.
5. Repeat #3 and #4 until one player runs out of cards. Once a player has run out cards, the remaining players count the number of cards they have and the player with the most cards wins. Another round is played if time allows. (This allowed all students to be engaged the entire time we were practicing.)
Note: If two or more players had identical slopes/y-intercepts, each of those players turned over a new card to act as a tie breaker.
It worked really well and all of my students, even those that are reluctant to do anything in class, enjoyed this activity.
Here are the links where you can download these files. Here's a pdf copy and an editable Publisher version. Now that I've blogged again, I'm going to try keep and and blog on a more regular basis.
