Episode of the Week: On Sale (Percentages)
Purpose of the episode
Solve problems involving percentages in an intuitive way. Provide a visual basis for understanding the proportional nature of percentages.Model real life situations with percentages considering the whole, part,and percentage.
Description
Pop needs help manning the store. In her absence, the child helps customers figure out prices and discounts. Luckily, Pop's special tool can help!
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Consonance with Our Pedagogical Principles
What makes it great?
The interactive tool encourages a conceptual understanding of percentages.
This tool exploits technology and engages the child by giving them direct control of visualizing what percentages mean and how they work – children learn by doing. Wrong answer feedback is informative, taking further advantage of the tool to provide visual reinforcement.
The emphasis of the episode is modeling of a relevant situation.
Each question requires a slightly different perspective on the relationship between the whole, part, and percentage. Within this natural setting, the child builds flexibility in thinking about the topic and gains problem solving skills.
The episode provides many opportunities for personalization.
Multiple variants, at different levels of difficulty, allow children to thrive in a heterogeneous classroom. Additionally, children can choose an optional tutorial at the start of the episode, which itself demonstrates multiple strategies to solve the same problem. Even wrong answer feedback is personalized to react to specific mistakes.
Mathematical Background
Percentage is a mathematical conceptwhose importance stems almost entirely from its applications in day-to-day life.Solving real life problems can help children see the significance of thesubject, but modeling situations mathematically is a real challenge.
For example, students often find it hard to determine which amount to represent as 100%. Moreover, this subject is often taught algorithmically, with a focus on abstract expressions involving fractions and calculations. In this episode we provide a special tool that takes away any need for computations. Instead, it allows students to focus on applying percentages in a meaningful and natural context, and also reflects the relation of percentages to ratio and proportion.
Play all the variants!