Fractions, Decimals, Percents, Ratios:
General

The 1963 Buick Riviera

Use the information provided to make, from clay, an accurate model of the car at 1/64 scale.

Get the Activity

The $20 Bill

Eddie has a new design for a $20 bill that he thinks would be hard to counterfeit. He knows that he has to give exact measurements in his design.

Get the Activity

Bat Mobile

There are many kinds of bats. Some are smaller, and some are bigger. Use these patterns to make a mobile with bats. The numbers show the weight of each bat, in grams. Use math to balance your mobile.

Get the Activity

Bert's Skirts

Work out how the cost of materials for a skirt would be changed if we used a blend of rayon and cotton in place of pure cotton.

Get the Activity

Battle of the Batteries

The capacity of a battery is the quantity of electrical current it can produce for a length of time, measured in a unit called “milliampere hours” ( abbreviated as “mAh”). This determines how long the battery lasts.

Get the Activity

Buying Supplies

There are many times that the ability to estimate a total cost of a set of items is useful, and a facility with such mental arithmetic will also improve a student’s mathematical selfconfidence.

Get the Activity

Cell Phone Fundraiser

Suppose that your school wants to raise money to build a new computer lab, and you have the idea of collecting old cell phones and recycling them. Since it was your idea, the Student Council asks you to find out how much money you can that way.

Get the Activity

The Doghouse

Planning the construction of a doghouse requires lots of math skills.

Get the Activity

The Forest and the Trees

Forest ranger Arnold Wilson wants to plant three kinds of trees on a mountain: Ponderosa Pine, Douglas fir, and White Fir.

Get the Activity

How Tall?

Find the heights of people and things with a little proportional thinking.

Get the Activity

Mission to the Moon

For the orbital motion of the moon, we use the fact that the moon completes one orbit (360°) every 655 hours to set up the proportion h/655 = n/360, where h = the number of hours that have passed and n = the number of degrees that the moon has moved in its orbit.

Get the Activity

Mixing Colors

Use percents to create colors.

Get the Activity

Organic Acres

Use this activity to teach students how to determine percent increase, have students first subtract to find the total amount of acreage increase in California and the U.S. from 2000 to 2006.

Get the Activity

Penny Percent Patterns

Create patterns with a hundred pennies and you have an interesting percents exercise.

Get the Activity

Polygon Percent Patterns

Put these two math topics together and you can create some interesting designs.

Get the Activity

Skateboard Flex

One important quality of a skateboard is its “flex”—how far the deck will bend when weight is put on it, and how well it snaps back to its original shape.

Get the Activity

Smoothies

Use a knowledge of fractions to make the right amount of a healthy drink.

Get the Activity

Wow Airplanes

Here’s the project: make a set of paper airplanes, but start with different sized sheets of paper, so that the ratio of wingspan to airplane length is different in each case.

Get the Activity