Somebody on Twitter recently pointed out the In-N-Out Burger 100 x 100 activity is ten years old this year? In a related story, I’m old.
Sometimes I feel like rolling this one out non-ironically is like the sweet grandmother who posted an earnest restaurant review of Olive Garden. But the thing is, it stands up. It’s still engaging (do yourself a favor and read the Shauna Hedgepeth post on presenting 100×100 to administrators in her district), it involves real math, and hey, anytime I can bring a little SoCal vibe to my Region classroom, I’m down.
Plus the reaction to the 20×20 photo never gets old.
We’re in the process of transitioning our district high schools to the New Tech model. Long story short, that means building in problem-based activities in math class. Our trainer recommended going deep into the problem set in a textbook and pulling out a word problem we could modify to fit the format. Which, OK, but I think we can do better. Or 10-ish years of hanging around the fringes of the #MTBoS will have been wasted. I’ve been slowly dishing out links to Three-Act Math tasks to my geometry colleagues, hinting that there’s no need to re-invent the wheel when awesomeness is there for the taking.
And part of that process is getting students acclimated to a different way of doing math. Focusing on one problem for an entire class period or two, working collaboratively in small groups, showing work in multiple ways, kids doing the heavy lifting, cognitively speaking.
So on Day Two of my two-block algebra review, I felt like 100×100 would accomplish all those things for me.
Method to the madness, right?
I haven’t presented 100×100 in-person since the Before Times. Maybe 2018? (Now that I think back on it I think my then-district’s Comms person came out to do a photo shoot of the 100×100 activity and put it on the district social as an example of the cool stuff happening in classrooms there.) Anyway, it’s been a minute. I did use it as a hook when I presented on building an online PLN at a summer conference a few years ago.
And I did try it out during remote learning my first year back at Gavit. Kind of a dud, tbh. Wish I would have known then that somebody had taken 100×100 and Desmosified it. Godsend.
This year I presented the activity 6 times over two days of 80-minute blocks. I used an Estimation180 task as my bellringer to acclimate my students to “too high/too low/game show guess” which cost me some (well worth it) minutes. But I was a little rusty on the pacing, and I found myself trying too hard for too long to help them discover the pattern.
Which meant that the “actual math” part of the activity got kind of squeezed in at the end. I had to give away too much of the process of building the equation, which kind of defeats the purpose. I feel like I was able to make the proper adjustments (alternating between “talk at your table about what you notice” and having students just type their answer into Desmos without a discussion, rather than both) for Day Two and we were back on track.
So much so that in two of my classes students were able to come up with, if not an actual equation, at least the words for the pattern and then use that to calculate the price correctly. There was much celebrating of their efforts.
So yes, do 100×100 with your Algebra class or your Geometry class or your Math 8 class or whatever. Always good times. Plus, the possiblity of a story you can use down the line. As I related to my kids today:
This is probably 2015 or 2016, Algebra 1 at Gavit, we’d done 100×100 and a few weeks later one of my students tells me she’s going to visit family over winter break, they are going to be in Vegas and she wants to go to In-N-Out and order a 20×20.
Be still my heart, right? I aksed her to tell me all about it when they got back. Which she did. Even brought a picture. But the way she told the story was so perfect. She said she got to the counter, ordered the 20×20, and the girl working the register said, “We don’t really do that anymore. You order a Double-Double, then order 18 extra patties and cheese.”
So very very perfect. I give my kids the first part of that story with the 20×20 picture so they know it’s a real thing, and the second half after they’ve built the pattern for the cost of a NxN burger. Now my geometry kids are in the club.
Math In Real Life, baby.
Tweaking For No Reason 
lol the ” before times”
*stealing*
LikeLike