In this engaging activity, students use percentages to make alloys to create beautiful works of art for Noova’s exclusive clientele.

Students manipulate objects in the environment to achieve a meaningful goal, motivating students to explore the subject of percentages.

There are two variants in the tasks which students perform:

• Represent a whole using percentage parts
• Represent parts and wholes with percentages

Learning objectives

• Create a whole starting with a given percentage. Up to three parts may be used.
• Deduce the percentage part of a whole from the number of objects and the numbers of other parts.
• Use proportional reasoning in a concrete setting.

How this Activity Aligns with Matific’s Principles

We carefully design all of our activities, including this one, to align with our pedagogical principles. This intriguing activity:

• Helps students achieve a conceptual understanding of percentages by creating the same alloy in different amounts.
• Provides students with a meaningful, relevant, real-world context. In this case, the task is to help Noova with her clients.
• Requires students to use critical thinking skills and think deeply about percentages.
• Offers personalized learning with a broad range of adaptive responses.
• Helps students develop intrinsic engagement as they use percentages to solve interesting problems and create beautiful jewelry

I want to know more!

Mathematical background

In this exciting episode, students build upon already acquired knowledge related to proportions, fractions, and decimals.

While working with Noova, students bridge their ability to find the percentage part of a known whole to finding all parts in a given ratio that make up an unknown whole.

To create these connections, students first work with simple percentages and fix a single term. For example, students must find X where X:4 is in the ratio of 60%:40%. After some practice, a third term is introduced, helping students extend the same logic they just applied in a new and more difficult context.

Ultimately the episode leads students to identify an unknown whole from given parts and percentages. The manipulative elements allow students to explore and produce possible answers visually. Yet, students must answer numerically. This ensures that students complete the abstraction process, are able to reason in a proportional context and express their conclusions in percentages.

Highlights

In this episode, students become jewellers who make different alloys from raw materials, creating an exciting context for exploring percentages.
First, students are asked to add a quantity so that it represents a given percentage:

Upon completing this successfully, students move on to a greater challenge: balancing a three-part ratio:

The progression of questions actively explores the idea of proportion - changing the overall size of a whole created by the student, while maintaining the relative sizes of the parts. Throughout the activities, students receive support as needed through clues and adaptive responses. Plus, the storyline is interesting and exciting, keeping students engaged in each task.

It is worth replaying the episode multiple times just to see the way the episode adapts to different student responses. The activities have many correct solutions, and all are fully supported.

To boost excitement and interest, Noova runs out of gas at the end of one of the episodes:

How will Noova melt the last of the alloy? Find out yourself by trying out this activity! 

Try it now!