Movin' On Up!
Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 5:44PM 
The Jeffersons. Best. Show. Ever.
I've moved form being a 5th grade teacher to an 8th grade Math/Science teacher! School started August 1st with students, and I'm really excited to use KA in my classroom from the beginning of the year. I have not began to use it yet due to a lack of computers but am super interested to see how it will play out with my more mature, independent, and self-monitoring students.
Over the (short) summer, I've been volunteering my time for KA by writing word problems in an effort to increase the number of quality word problem exercise modules. Some of the existing modules don't scaffold practice and assessment effectively, so I'm excited to contribute a set of word problems that do.
For example, this is the first arithmetic word problem students on KA would encounter:
Ishaan is putting jelly beans into piles. If he puts 8 jelly beans in each pile he will make 5 piles and have 4 jelly beans left over. If he instead puts 2 jelly beans in each pile, how many piles of jelly beans can he make?
Students need practice solving word problems with just addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division before they can tackle this one. I'm excited for students to practice the plethora of word problems coming to the modules. Examples include the following.
(Multiplication Word Problem) A specific book costs $18. That is 2 times more than a DVD. How much does a DVD cost?
(Division Word Problem) Charles rode his bike for a total of 240 kilometers in the past 8 days. He rode the same distance every day. How many kilometers did Charles bike each day?
(Addition Word Problem) On a vacation your family travels 26 miles on the first day, 34 miles on the second day, and 22 miles on the third day. How many total miles did they travel?
(Subtraction Word Problem) There are 30 employees working in an office building. 5 of them left to go to a meeting. How many employees are left in the building?
Reader Comments (6)
Hey Harsh,
Are you teaching Algebra or Basic Math (pre-algebra). Let's keep in touch and help each other with KA. Maybe figure out a collaboration project we can do together. I start in 2 weeks.
Joe
Joe,
I'm teaching it all. I'm the only 8th grade Math/Science teacher for my school. I'm starting off with pre-algebra, and building to algebra as the year goes on. I also teach geometry, probability and more advanced number sense. Will you be using the same list of required exercises for your students as last year?
I've been working on a couple new word problems, and I'd love to create those earlier arithmetic ones that you mentioned. Did you see the Ratio Word Problems exercise that came out recently? :) Happy new school year!
Marcia,
Yes, I did! It's awesome. I'm trying to learn how to create exercises as well. I feel like if I knew how to code them, I'd be an exercise generating machine. Peter Kuperman's been super-helpful with this process so far. Looking forward to more exercises,
-- Harsh
I am teacher at a non-profit private school that is not funded by the school board. So we also had the challenge of insufficient computers. Alas, we found Userful's multiseat (http://userful.com/products/userful-multiseat-linux). For hardware all we needed was a powerful system (we're using an quad-core i7) with 10 thin-clients, monitors, keyboards and mice. Now we have a lab with 16 stations which costed us less than $5k to setup. Khan academy runs great on this setup however there is some delay if everyone simultaneously watches videos in HD.
Hamza,
Thanks! This is really helpful! I'll definitely be looking into this in more detail.