I implemented Part 1 of my lesson. This was a 3 day lesson which required the students to first take some pictures of circles that were in our school building. They were instructed to find many various sized circles. We were able to then download these photos onto a school folder so that all classes would have access to them. On day two students were introduced to image J. School IT people had added the program to our computer lab. We took the class for students to explore after a short intro using the Mona Lisa lesson from the summer work at MIT.
On day 3 students
Made a folder and named it
Selected 10 photos from the folder, making sure to name or number each photo for identification purposes
Finally students measured the diameter and circumference of each of their circles using Image J. They recorded the information in their notebooks.
Students made two columns in their notebooks for the information.
The columns were named circumference and diameter.
The information from each of the 10 photos was entered into the notebook.
Originally, I had planned to have my students use an Excel Spreadsheet for analyzing the results, but they seemed to have had enough computer work using Image J to measure the 10 circles.
Next students used calculators to take the circumference and divide it by the diameter.
Things were pretty quiet for a few minutes. Then students thought they had made some kind of mistake as most of their calculations were around 3. There were 7 pairs of students working. As more and more of the same number appeared, students thought that either they had made a mistake or that I was playing a trick on them. This segwayed into a wonderful discussion and solving the "Mystery of Circles and Pi".
I was extremely pleased with the results of my students. I am fortunate as the class is small, they love investigating with both of these pluses on my side it makes it easy to go the extra step. I am planning to use this same plan with my higher level students in the spring and will definitely include the Excel Spreadsheet component

Donna:

I'm thrilled that this has worked as well as you hoped, including the Aha! of discovery. I'm hopeful the kids will want to use ImageJ again!

Chord-shaped smiles,
LuAnn

Hello Donna,

I will use this lesson with my math class. My kids seem to love ImageJ, and this is an awesome lesson. I think having the kids use calculators was actually better than using Excel, because they manipulated the numbers themselves.

Thanks,

MaryAnn