Race Ready!

Iditarod is just around the corner! And, as we all know, there are a million and one ways to use the excitement of the race to motivate learning!

Join KEA for our February Specail Event: Race Ready! And we'll show you the BEST way!

Race Ready is a great program that approaches the Iditarod as a big, huge, giant math problem that your students will love to solve!

Racing sled dogs is all about figuring out how far you can run, how long it will take you to run it, and how much rest the dogs need until they can do it again!

So, in other words, it's nothing but one long RATE equation! But one that's just slightly more interesting than figuring out when one train leaving Chicago is going to meet up with another leaving form California!

In Race Ready we'll start out by going for a dog run- just to see why musher's love to run. Then we'll move into the strategies distances racers use win. You guessed it... rate equations! And finally, we'll wrap it all up by examining how to interpret the race updates data that all races post on the web! At the end of the program your students will not only have learned how to use rate equations in a real life setting but they'll be dying for Iditarod to start so they can do it some more!

To find out more about the program, learn how it's adapted throughout grade levels, or register, visit our website here.

I took a few dog pictures yesterday.  They aren't anything special, just photos as I sat in the kennel and visited with the dogs before feeding, but it is hard for me to spend anytime out there without planning, strategizing  (Is that a real word?), or generally thinking about things to come- different trails will run, races we'll do together, etc...

Yesterday, what I was thinking about most was what traits make a good sled dog. And of course all my dogs are good dogs! 

I have a whole set of ideas on this but thought it might be a great exercise for students to think through this own their own.
It applies directly to understanding how we classify and rate many things in our lives, anything from sports teams to our favorite movies.

So here is a task:
Look at the photos tagged 'dogs' on my Flikr stream and decide which ones you would classify as “great,” “good,” or “okay.

Questions to consider:
What defines the quality of a sled dog?
What traits distinguish one sled dog from another? Are they visible in a photo?

 
Make a list of the dogs you looked at and sort them based on the 3 categories from above- Great, Good, Okay.

Now create a table to look at the relative 'quality' of each dog and
assign a numerical scale of 1-5 (1 is 'Okay” 5 is 'great') for each trait
 
 
    Trait #1    Trait #2    Trait #3       
Lost                   
Raj                   
Hero                

Add up the totals for each dog and sort them from highest to lowest.

Some questions to address:
Does your 'qualitative' list match the 'quantitative' results of your table?

Why? Why not?

What additional information about each individual dog would help to classify the dogs more accurately?

And finally, if you were putting together a dog team would you use this kind of analysis to help you? (Why? Why not?)

Okay, now I better get out there and go for a run...

Ohh and by the way, in my mind, all my dogs come out as GREAT!