![]() Step 3: Set the scenario explaining that the person making the pattern using the specified number of blocks is Mission Control and all others participating are Space Ship Crew Members. Step 2: Using the folders or books to block others’ views, one student in the group (or pair) constructs a pattern using the specified number of blocks. Suggestion: Start with two each of two different polygons. Step 1: Determine which blocks will be used for Game 1. Materials: Folders or books to serve as dividers, pattern blocks or tangrams Mission Control Games: (Originally published in Powerful Problem Solving, Heinemann 2013)įormat: Students working in pairs or groups of four. Make sure students are aware that Katherine Johnson, and other women at NASA at the time, went beyond the expectations to “invent the math” and be problem solvers.Įxplain that we are going to play a game that will encourage students to think about math in new ways, apply some problem-solving, and work on a version of the problem that Katherine Johnson went on to work on at NASA: how to communicate with the astronauts in space when some part of your communication has failed, and you need them to understand the geometry or rocket trajectory to get home again. Help students understand what role the women at NASA were hired to do (carry out the sort of calculations that calculators and computers now do, based on others’ instructions), how hard that work was, and also how it was different from what the white male engineers were expected to do (apply mathematical ideas in new ways to problems that no one had solved before). Lesson Launch: Play one or more trailers from the movie, Hidden Figures. ![]() Hidden Figures trailers: (particularly the second trailer, “Give or Take”įolders or books to put up between students to make a barrier to hide each other’s work during the “Mission Control” gameĮither tangram or pattern block pieces or graphs and graph paper, depending on which version of the “Mission Control” game you want students to play ![]() Finally they reflect on their experiences dealing with mathematical frustrations, and the ways that Katherine Johnson’s experiences as a Black woman might have helped prepare her to be a pioneer in her field. ![]() Overview: Students discuss Hidden Figures and what it might have meant that Katherine Johnson had to “make new mathematics” where “there is no formula.” They play a game about communicating mathematical ideas across barriers, that may force them to “see beyond the numbers” and come up with new mathematics. ![]()
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