Tsunami

So this week I took the students through the events of Sri Lanka in 2004. We watched a few clips of the horror and they asked tons of questions. My students were all around the age 0f 9 or 10 at this time, but they remembered it. We discussed the devastation and what a tsunami was and how they are created.

I then used Google Earth to show them where the earthquake had taken place. Using a "ruler" tool, I was able to connect a line from the coastline of Sri Lanka to the epicenter and measure the distance. I made up another spot of where the wave was after "X" amount of seconds and some times of when this was taking place. I explained to the kids that they are the Homeland Security of the nation of Sri Lanka, and they have to figure out how long the had before the wave hits the coastline. They must evacuate the coastline by a certain time after figuring out the speed of the wave.

After giving them some time, I went ahead and showed them how I would've solved it. A lot of them were very close in solving the problem. They used the tools given to them by previous teachers to solve the problem. I then proceeded to give them some new tools in which we use in algebra formulas. Slope and the Point-Slope Formula in function form was my goal for them that day.

Granted, this kept the students attention and they were all 100% engaged in figuring it out. The entire time that I was giving the lesson, I was thinking, how can I have them do all of this? I think upon reflection, I would give them some coordinates to find on the earth and find the distances on their own. I would show them the tools to use on google earth and they would have to recreate that much. I would provide an XY table for those that I saw subtracting the distance for each second that went by. I also think that I would send them a video of how to create functions from real life problems to see if my brightest students were able to come up with something.

The finale of the day was to have them create their own real life problem given some numbers. I wanted to see if they were able to be creative even though the numbers were just given to them. I did this because we were getting pressed for time. I know in the future that I want them to look up a natural disaster and come up with their own scenario using real data.