Goals

The goal of this activity is for students to complete the first of four parts of the final written proposal: the Current Situation.

 

Details

Duration: 90 minutes

Assessments: Student writing

 

Description

Students are asked to summarize the information they have been given to San Francisco's residents and city officials. While it needs to be understandable to the general resident, it also needs to show, to those who are interested, the math behind the problem, so anything written mathematically needs to be translated into a written explanation as well.

The Current Situation section should include, but is not limited to, written and mathematical descriptions of the:
* different pieces of land that were donated to the city
* stipulations that must be met in order for everyone in the city to be happy

It should also include a preview of what you will do in the report to solve the city's problem. The plan should include:
* A general strategy for solving a linear programming problem of this magnitude
* Justifications of how you will analyze the possible solutions and how you will know which is most cost-efficient

Students worked individually on their writing as I walked from group to group to clarify questions.

Author Reflections

This was the easiest part of the proposal for students to get started with. They had all the information they needed from the Decoding Activity and all they needed to do was summarize it, while also explaining the variables defined and equations/inequalities created. I ended up having to clarify the strategy needed to solve this type of problem. We had used it with 3 and 4 variables, but students seemed to need clarification once we were using 6 variables.