My Head Hurts

JASON THINKING

So, I'm sitting here trying to think of a webquest...................................and sitting....................................and sitting..................................you get the point.  I've never designed one before, but I've used them.  I've also seen a ton of webquests out there for graphing lines for algebra and so I knew I didn't want to do that.  In fact, most people attack that area of the subject when creating online tools.  It's good because that is an important part of the curriculum, but the focus of these lines usually is on the same thing, slope and y intercept.  Whatever, I'm not going to do that anyway.  Well, here I am thinking of something a bit more ambitious.  Unfortunately, this is where my brain always takes me.  I don't want to reinvent the wheel, I always seem to want to invent the wheel.

I'm now thinking of the area of algebra that I want to learn more about, but also want the students to understand.  The area of quadratics.  In taking a test this week on linear systems, I used a webquest that focus on buying a car that would be most efficient.  I had one of the students say to me, "I didn't know this is what these things were for".  It dawned on me that we hadn't covered the word problems or real world scenarios in that particular class because of time restraints.  We only went through process.  I figured at that moment, I would make sure that I apply the concept of real world at the beginning.  It's really not hard to understand the mathematics and what it means, it is hard to actually recreate the algebra behind all of the data collection and graphs.

AND NOW my quest begins.  A quadratic problem that would give the students a good idea of what they are doing at the beginning of me actually having them learn the processes.

Thus far, my first problem was to take all of the ideas in my head and focus on something that they would find interesting.  After looking at some of the word problems that others had posted I've settled on traffic accidents.  Students will look at different demographic areas such as age vs. AA members, texting vs. age, cell phone calls vs. age, age vs. accidents.  I think that I will have appropriate links for them to find the information, but I haven't found anything great, but I've found the information.  Now, I'm stuck on the Introduction.  Do I go with a game show theme or do I go with helping out a family member letter?  UGH!!!!! Ultimately, I would like them to be able to write a letter to someone that actually could use this information to help apply laws.  If my students were able to make a change, that would be pretty cool.  Since my little part in class was to look at the collaboration, I thought this was a great idea.  So I have definitely included that as part of the quest.

The hardest part of this is in making sure that if I actually want to use this, I've found myself doing a lot of research on quality websites.  Again, I've found the information, but I would like for them to actually have to use some sort of database or something to have to search for it, not really just read an article and collect the info out of it.

And so it is, my head hurts.