As far as slope goes, math students can have a lot of fun and engagement when determining the relationship between slope and flow rate. Imagine using a piece of guttering (or PVC pipe sliced vertically) and letting the kids determine how the angle of the guttering affects the velocity of the water flowing down it. No need to reinvent the wheel on that. If it sounds like something you’d like to do I’ll send you a math lesson on that. The STEM challenge might involve coming up with a process for controlling the flow rate.

I’m also glad you clarified for me the issue. I had thought of doing some of the extensions you mentioned, but I didn’t realize they would be STEM. Goes to show that I didn’t realize that defining the parameters of the problem along with its costs to the community would be “engineery” enough because it didn’t offer solutions.

Thanks for your help and I definitely know what I’m going to do now.

Anne is a terrific colleague of mine and we work together in developing those STEM design challenges she mentioned in an earlier post. First let me say, as a former middle grades math teacher, I am so impressed to see you out there doing everything you can to give your students real integrated STEM experiences and connecting the math they are learning to some meaningful applications. Kudos to you!!

I’m familiar with the dripping faucet problem — and, I agree, these savvy 8th graders might just say, “Go buy a washer” — (but, having watched my husband do just that — it is no simple process and requires problem solving; unfortunately that solution doesn’t involve slope!) I’m wondering if you couldn’t connect the lesson to the real 21st century problem of sufficient supply of clean water (which is one of the identified engineering grand challenges for this century). You could ask the students to do some research to determine how much of a problem the leaky faucet poses as part of a community awareness campaign. Part of the research could include determining the scope of the problem using the lesson you described. But ideally, it would go further — and involve more integration of subjects and get more “real”. This is where having other teachers partner with you is so valuable. A related science or language arts research investigation could be – what exactly happens to that wasted water? Is it recycled back into the community’s water works system. Is there a substantial additional cost involved to the community? What is the cost to the owner of the leaky faucet? Could we gather data to see how many families have leaky faucets? Perhaps there are some graphs the students could look at that show an approximately linear relationship between some of these variables over time. The students could then explore the slope of the trend line and determine the average rate of change and then project the problem’s impact in the future.

But, wow…..I can hear you thinking — given my situation — developing something like this is going to take way more time than I have!! And, you are probably right. I just wanted to put it out there to show how valuable it is if you can get teachers from other content areas to join you on your STEM mission. Our writers have found that developing meaningful integrated STEM lessons is a rather challenging task, especially when you don’t have folks with different perspectives to help develop the ideas and lessons. In the beginning we had 3 math teachers doing the writing – and I was one of them. Now we have science (Anne was our first science writer added to the team — and what a great addition!), engineering and math educators, industry practitioners, and most importantly – experienced teachers on the writing team. The STEM modules are so much richer and more authentic today – and the middle grades students are even more engaged. We are all learning so much about our specific content fields and how they connect to and are applied in the world of work. We are learning how we sometimes use different words in math and in science that mean the same thing – and the students fail to see the connections.

Well I’m rambling on now –I do tend to get carried away with the topic of STEM! Marsha, I hope you’ll continue trying to find those rich opportunities to connect math to how it is used to solve problems in our world. Anytime you do that, students will be gaining a greater appreciation for the value of math in their world. And… I hope you’ll keep up the dialogue on this blog and continue to engage your science colleagues in your quest – maybe initially through just asking for their suggestions of connections, perhaps a monthly STEM supper discussion group??

Best wishes this coming year — I’ll watch for your posts….Susan

Thanks for this great thinking piece. It really helped me differentiate between what I’m trying to do in math and how these kinds of tasks would become a STEM kind of learning experinece.

So here’s my current dilemma…. I have a number of students that have pre-tested out of a unit on slope. I want to have them simulate a leaking faucet, collect the data about the volume of water lost per 5-second intervals. The math part of this asks them to predict how much will be lost in a week, a month, a year and so on. I can also amp up the math by adding in how much it will cost…giving them practice using decimals and algebra.

If I’m understanding you correctly, in order for this to be more of a STEM thing, I’d need to then hook the leaking faucet to a real world problem. That’s sort of where I get stuck. I’d expect 8th graders to say replace the washer or the entire faucet. So what kind of real-world problem could I rewrite this problem into to give them an engineering design problem associated with dripping water???? Thanks Anne I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas and I hope that my dilemma is where other people might be stuck, too…so your answer could help them, too.