Factor Towers

Eric shared activities from a draft lesson on factors, multiples, primes and composites. The lesson is linked in the post if you are interested in using the materials from the meeting. He would love feedback if you use it with a class.

Facilitator(s): Eric Appleton
Date of Meeting: May 10, 2018
Problem: · url

Launch

To start off the meeting, Eric put us into groups and gave each group a bag of paper tiles. He asked us to spend a few minutes looking at them and discussing anything we noticed.

After some exploration in smaller groups, we came back together to share some of the things we noticed:

Counting With Factor Tiles

Then Eric had us use the tiles to come up with the numbers 1 through 30. If we don’t have a number, we have to build it with multiplication and tiles we do have.

Then we shared some things we noticed:

Unanswered question: What is the smallest number you can’t make using multiplication and this set of prime factor tiles?

Finding the Factors of a Number

Then we took the three prime numbers that can be multiplied to give us 30 and arranged them in different orders to come up with all of the factors of 30.

Then Eric asked us to think about whether 50 would have more, fewer, or the same number of factors as 30. He only gave us about 30 seconds to consider his question and then took a vote. Here are the results of the poll:

More: 5
Less: 6
Not sure: 1

He then gave us a few minutes to find the prime factors of 50 using the tiles, then find all of its factors by grouping tiles.

Vocabulary

Eric is working on a lesson using these activities. The group looked over a vocabulary worksheet and gave feedback on the questions and the definitions for important vocabulary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Problem-Posing/Problem-Solving

For the heart of the meeting, Eric asked us to construct factor towers, where the height of the tower corresponds to the number of factors a number has. He has us begin on a 5×5 grid and then expanded our explorations to a 10×10 grid.

We get track of the towers on a graph as we went.

group explorations

Further discussion:

In Attendance: Linda, Matthew, Ann, Greg, David, Betty, Eric, Mark, Todd, Jun, Raheem, Spencer, Mr. Hill

Programs Represented: LaGuardia Community College, Brooklyn Public Library, Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn, CUNY Start, DOE/Office of Adult & Continuing Education, District 79, Pathways to Graduation, CUNY Adult Literacy & HSE Program


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