{"id":5863,"date":"2011-03-29T13:47:53","date_gmt":"2011-03-29T05:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=5863"},"modified":"2011-03-27T13:55:22","modified_gmt":"2011-03-27T05:55:22","slug":"lesson-idea-for-order-of-operations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learn-math\/lesson-idea-for-order-of-operations-5863","title":{"rendered":"Lesson idea for order of operations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some math lessons can be a bit, shall we say, \"dry\". The topic \"Order of Operations\" would certainly fall into that category.<\/p>\n

This topic includes gems like BODMAS (brackets first, then divisions and multiplications as you come to them from left to right; finally additions and subtractions as you come to them from left to right).<\/p>\n

Here's an alternative way to get students involved in this topic. It's based on a submission by Sunil Singh in the Escape the Textbook community<\/a> (quoted in NaturalMath).<\/p>\n

The Lesson<\/h2>\n

Give out a sheet of paper which has the numbers 1 to 24 down the left-hand column.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Students have to construct an operations question using just the numbers 1, 3, 4 and 6 to produce each one of the numbers 1 to 24.\u00a0Only addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and brackets<\/strong> can be used.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No \"fancy\" operations like exponents and factorials, or concatenation of the numbers (you can't write \"34\" as one of the numbers) are allowed.<\/p>\n

Each number has to be used exactly once.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To start, get students to suggest some basic operations with the 4 allowed numbers and see what you get. For example:<\/p>\n

1 + 3 + 4 + 6 = 14<\/p>\n

6 × 4 − 3 − 1 = 20<\/p>\n

(6 +\u00a01) × (4 − 3) = 7<\/p>\n

You get the idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Try this with your class next time the Order of Operations topic comes up (or when you have an \"activities\" lesson planned).<\/p>\n

Tell me how it goes.<\/p>\n

See the 3 Comments<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Order<\/a>Here's a motivating way for students to learn order of arithmetic operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}