My Love for Math
I am the vice president of a STEM-based club at my school. With both middle schoolers and high schoolers, I orchestrate different activities combining science, technology, engineering, and math in a fun but educational way. For our last meeting, I came up with the idea of a forensic lab. Over the course of three months, I designed a murder-solving activity. There would be fingerprint sampling, footprint analysis, and picture comparisons. For every activity we do, I work to incorporate mathematics in a fun way. For this lab, I wanted to add an activity where the members would find the time of death of the victim based on different values. The goal was that the members would only need to solve 3 out of the four activities in order to narrow down the suspect list to three people. From there, the final activity would reveal the murderer.
It is always hard putting math activities in a club where the academic levels are so different. With some students learning about shapes and others half way through calculus, closing the mathematical gap is a challenge. This lab that I created centered around an algebra 2 concept: exponential relationships. My main goal was to keep the high schoolers engaged while the middle schoolers could learn some new mathematical skills.
One of my favorite things about mathematics is that there are no dead ends. From lines to different graphs, to calculus, each topic leads into more math. These are also logical connections as any question about a math concept leads to a new concept. I would have to break down this problem into different steps so that people who might only know about graphing a line could find the equation to an exponential relationship.
My first part of breaking down this problem was giving the girls the basic equation:
I then went through and explained each part of this equation. These letters meant nothing to the middle schoolers yet and even some of the high schoolers had a hard time understanding the variables. I helped the girls think through the problem logically. They had 4 main givens:
The normal temperature of the body
The temperature of the body when it was found
The temperature of the body a certain time after when it was found
The temperature of the room
With each of these values, they were able to discover a new part of the equation.
The temperature of the room had to be the (+ K) since the body couldn’t cool below that value. I also added a new vocabulary word for that situation: asymptote or something the y value of a graph would “approach“ but never equate. Using similar logic, the girls were able to solve more and more of this equation. I also wrote up short bullet points on what exponents and logarithms were so the girls could use a calculator to find exact solutions. Even with all of this, there was still a lot that the girls had to think through and struggle on their own.
One such example was units. They would have to choose a certain time to be “initial time“ or “time zero“ to base the rest of their solutions around. They would also need to agree on whether they would use hours, minutes, Celcius, or Fahrenheit. Each group that worked on this problem chose a slightly different route and therefore had variations to their equations. I enjoyed watching the girls advocate for their chosen method and justify their mathematics decisions. This was new territory for most of the girls, and I was extremely pleased to watch them solve each step of this activity.
The rest of the group who had been working on the other labs had narrowed the suspect list down to ten people. They needed the Time Of Death for the final part of the problem. The teams struggled with this one problem for over an hour. They knew that the entire murder case rested on their shoulders. Finally, one 7th grader shot up her hand and yelled out the time of death: 3:15 pm. The rest of the teams all cheered and ran over to congratulate her. They had all collaborated on this same problem together and had all been part of this solution. Then, the girls frantically gathered all of the suspect pages and complied a list of the 2 remaining subjects.
Even though that 7th grader had never even heard of exponential equations before or even seen their graphs, she was able to build off her previous mathematical knowledge and solve this hard math problem. She was so excited to successfully work through this extremely challenging problem. Her excitement, along with the support and collaboration from the rest of the girls, made my face light up with a smile. After pouring hours into this activity each night for the last couple of months, I got to see all of my work paid off. Best of all, I got to see the process of discovering new math and then applying it to a real-life situation. This day re-affirmed why I love math so much and why I work to help others discover those real-world connection.