Will You Live to be 110?

Welcome to "Will You Live to be 110?", a 4-6 week project-based mathematics unit designed to be used in a high school math course.  If you are a teacher who is planning to implement this unit with your students, here are some handy things for you to know or explore before you begin.  The main thing to notice is that this project does not require large amounts of background knowledge.  Math teachers should have all of the knowledge needed to orchestrate this project with their students, but there are a few tips that will make your journey through the lessons a bit smoother. 

This unit would work well for an Algebra II class, although if you are teaching statistics or probability, you could easily morph this lesson to accommodate your goals for the course.  The unit uses a topic that should be of interest to just about everyone (longevity) to explore mathematical concepts such as types of functions, function patterns, and statistical principles.  We feel that students will take a sincere interest in the project because they will be exploring topics of their choice within the general issue and will have a large role in creating their own knowledge through research and preparing for a public presentation to their community. 

            A good website to go to before you tackle this issue is http://www.livingto100.com/, which contains a life expectancy calculator for you to peruse.  The students will most likely find this very interesting, and it will give you many ideas to suggest, should the students not come up with some key topics you wish someone to explore.  Another major resource that will be key to the success of this unit is Texas Instruments free TI-Navigator system loaner program.  Texas Instruments will allow you, as a math (or science) teacher, to check out, at no charge, an entire TI-Navigator system.  If you are not familiar with this system, we recommend that you check it out because there are endless explorations that math and science students can perform with the system.  It links up TI-83 or TI-84 calculators (the standard graphing calculators that most high schools already have in their possession) to a central hub, connected to a main computer, which will allow interactive and generative lessons to be performed with the entire class.  In our experience, students tend to enjoy using this system, and the conceptual learning it enables is quite unique.  The link to the TI-Navigator borrowing process, which gives all of the information on how to borrow these systems, is http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/nonProductMulti/support_borrowtitechnology.html?bid=2. 

            All benchmark lesson plans included within this project guide contain resources that are clearly listed in the beginning of the lesson plan, including websites, any textbooks that may be needed, etc.  For the benchmark lessons on mean, median, and mode, the teacher's edition of the textbook listed is an added resource that you can use to help contextualize or personalize the lessons presented.  Two aspects of our lesson that we feel will enhance the intrinsic motivation for the students are the community experts that we suggest you bring in to consult with the students, and the City Hall presentation.  This may take a bit of work on your part to try and locate experts within your community that are willing to volunteer a couple hours of their time to come and speak to your students.  An actuary would be a good expert to invite, as well as any kind of health professional or statistician.  Whoever you find to come in will probably be useful to your students, but do not fear if you cannot find any experts- the project's integrity will not be compromised if the experts are omitted.  The City Hall trip is also not mandatory, but we recommend that if you cannot work out a time for the students to present their findings at City Hall, that you try to find another public arena that will give the students an opportunity to present their work to their community.  A special night at your school, open to all parents, or some other "meeting" would also serve this purpose for your students.

Thank you for your interest in our unit, and we wish you the best of luck with its implementation.  We hope that you and your students find this unit as fun (and educational) as we did making it!