Turn Bland Math Problems into Interactive Classrooms, with Multimedia

Math teacher Dan Meyer has an interesting TED Talk, where he begins by saying he's talking about a subject he loves to a captive audience of students who hate it, but are required to take the course (often remedial learners).

Eventually, he leads into a line problem in the familiar format,

• deletes the information, and
• instead runs a video of filling a large tank with water.
  

After several boring minutes, the curious students ask how long it will take to fill (the exact math problem), and are led into a highly interactive, enthusiastic search for the answer -- eventually solved by viewing the last frame in the film. Meanwhile, the students take guesses, which are placed on the board, and find out if they're right!

1. Dan Meyer cuts down the information presented. Students generate it and filter out what's needed and not.
2. He leads them into formulating the problem (as Einstein and Herb Simon have mentioned is one of the major parts of solving any problem).

   The real world of human decisions is not a world of ideal gases, frictionless planes, or vacuums. To bring it within the scope of human thinking powers, we must simplify our problem formulations drastically, even leaving out much or most of what is potentially relevant...problem solving and decision making is centrally concerned with how people cut problems down to size - Herb Simon

3. Dan Meyer recommends the use of multimedia -- plentiful these days!
4. He turns the problem into a story.

Here's the link to the 11-minute talk: Dan Meyer's TED Talk: Math Class Needs a Makeover