How do you get young teenagers excited to learn about right triangles? Northwest ISD teacher Tiffany Wood at Medlin Middle School has discovered if you mix in the right amount of Fortnite, the Pythagorean theorem gains a whole new level of popularity.
Northwest ISD officials visited Wood’s honors geometry class where it was day two of learning about right triangles. Day one focused on learning concepts and rules, and on day two it was already time to put them into action.
Wood, who enjoys playing Fortnite with her family, set up a Mystery Royale activity that had the class buzzing. It was based on Fortnite’s Battle Royale, a game where 100 players enter a game together and play until only one is remaining.
The Mystery Royale that Wood created was a logic puzzle in which students worked in teams to figure out what place seven friends finished in a round of Battle Royale. The activity featured several scenario questions that required solving triangles to earn clues to the logic puzzle.
As students arrived to class, Wood greeted each one at the door and instructed them to open their Chromebook and journal. She quickly explained the activity, students split into teams of two or three, and they were off to the races.
An example of a question was: “Jen spotted a loot chest on top of a tree across a lake. While crouched in the cabin by the dock, she used a scope to gauge the distance to the chest. The scope indicated that the chest was 160m from the barrel of the scope. How high in the air is the chest?”
With the correct answer, students got the clue “Star_Fork6 was eliminated first among his friends.” They used a “clue record” sheet to help keep track of possibilities for which positions the seven friends could’ve finished in.
As students worked through the scenarios, Wood was constantly moving around the room, checking on progress and offering assistance. For a few tricky scenarios, she had drawn helpful right triangles on the board.
At one point, Wood stopped the class to explain the term angle of depression, a new concept that would be needed for an upcoming scenario.
Groups remained focused throughout the entirety of the class and were constantly collaborating amongst themselves. Each student had a journal in which they sketched out right triangles and showed their work and problem-solving steps.
When the first group believed they had the correct answers, they came to Wood for a check. They had gotten all of the answers correct, and Wood promised to buy them their favorite candy bars in the next couple of days.
As more groups finished, they checked their answers with Wood and either went back to make corrections, or cheered being finished and grabbed a piece of “grandma candy” from a jar near Wood’s desk.
As groups finished, they could either help other groups or work on extra math activities on their Chromebooks.
Just like in many online video games, teamwork was of the utmost importance throughout the activity. It was remarkable to see how quickly students put concepts learned just one day prior into action and applied them to actual real-world problems (or at least real Fortnite-world problems).
The whole 45-minute class period seemed to pass by faster than a Fortnite Battle Royale match (typically 20-25 minutes), and that was certainly because students were engaged and focused throughout.
With a teacher like Wood, who knows how to sprinkle in just the right amount of Fortnite and grandma candy, Medlin’s honors geometry students are destined for great things.
(Courtesy | Northwest ISD)
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