The Friday Fave has been thinking about textbook problems recently. There are
some excellent ones in the world, but they are far too rare. Most of them
(I’m looking at you, bandana dog!) should would benefit from deletion
and composting.
But some textbook problems just need to be brought to life.
This week’s Friday Fave—Game, Set, Flat—is an example of such a problem. We don’t just TELL you that the relationship between the number of bounces and the bounce height is a geometric sequence, we SHOW you, and we draw on your experience.
We let you control the tennis ball. You are free to give this graph a try.
And when you do, we’ll show what that looks like in the real world
You can play around, of course, but there’s real work to be done here. Tennis balls must satisfy constraints and it’s your job to make sure they do. You’ll need math for that. With Game, Set, Flat, we’ve built an environment friendly to learning that math. So if you’re teaching exponential decay, or geometric sequences, come take a tour of the tennis ball factory.