At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play -- with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn't). Tim Brown is the CEO of the "innovation and design" firm IDEO--taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface

This task presents a foundational result in geometry, presented with deliberately sparse guidance in order to allow a wide variety of approaches. Teachers should of course feel free to provide additional scaffolding to encourage solutions or thinking in one particular direction. We include three solutions which fall into two general approaches, one based on reference to previously-derived results (e.g., the Pythagorean Theorem), and another conducted in terms of the geometry of rigid transformations.

The construction of the tangent line to a circle from a point outside of the circle requires knowledge of a couple of facts about circles and triangles. First, students must know, for part (a), that a triangle inscribed in a circle with one side a diameter is a right triangle. This material is presented in the tasks ''Right triangles inscribed in circles I.'' For part (b) students must know that the tangent line to a circle at a point is characterized by meeting the radius of the circle at that point in a right angle: more about this can be found in ''Tangent lines and the radius of a circle.''

Students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. They do this by attempting to identify several different foods that have similar textures. For some of the attempts, students hold their noses and close their eyes, while for others they only close their eyes. After they have conducted the experiment, they create bar graphs showing the number of correct and incorrect identifications for the two different experimental conditions tested.

This real world word problem about calculating a tip in a restaurant requires multiple steps.

This task is not about computing the final price of the shirt but about using the structure in the computation to make a general argument.

This simple conceptual problem does not require algebraic manipulation, but requires students to articulate the reasoning behind each statement.

Teacher praise is one tool that can be a powerful motivator for students. Surprisingly, research suggests that praise is underused in both general- and special-education classrooms (Brophy, 1981; Hawkins & Heflin, 2011; Kern, 2007). This guide offers recommendations to instructors for using praise to maximize its positive impact.Effective teacher praise consists of two elements: (1) a description of noteworthy student academic performance or general behavior, and (2) a signal of teacher approval (Brophy, 1981; Burnett, 2001).

All students can fully participate in science. To that end, we are sharing some of the resources, materials, and activities that we use with our students who are visually impaired.

When working with children with developmental disabilities, teachers can accomplish a great deal by managing the learning environment proactively to prevent behavior problems and promote learning. But identified students may also experience behavior or learning problems because they lack key skills (e.g., capacity to interact with other children in socially appropriate ways). Children with developmental disabilities should therefore have explicit skills-training in deficit areas as a central component in their curriculum.

A collection of tech tools, several links to various helpful websites,  and strategies from our 21st Century Competencies workshops from 2014-2015. 

This version of Go Fish allows students to practice recognizing and saying the teen numbers.

In this task students are given graphs of quantities related to weather. The purpose of the task is to show that graphs are more than a collection of coordinate points, that they can tell a story about the variables that are involved and together they can paint a very complete picture of a situation, in this case the weather.

These unit conversion problems provide a rich source of examples both for composition of functions (when several successive conversions are required) and inverses (units can always be converted in either of two directions).

Temperature conversions provide a rich source of linear functions which are encountered not only in science but also in our every day lives when we travel abroad. The first part of this task provides an opportunity to construct a linear function given two input-output pairs. The second part investigates the inverse of a linear function while the third part requires reasoning about quantities and/or solving a linear equation.

Students build model caverns and bury them in a tray of sand. They test the models by dropping balls onto them to simulate an asteroid hitting the Earth. By molding papier-mache or clay around balloons (to form domes), or around small cardboard boxes (to form rectangular structures), students create unique models of their cavern designs.

Students gain experience using the software/systems (engineering) design process, specifically focusing on the testing phase. This problem-based learning activity uses the design process to solve open-ended challenges. In addition to learning about test cases for testing software, students utilize the design process as a vehicle to work through a problem and arrive at a solution.

JUnit is a testing method that is included with NetBeans (Java) installs or can be downloaded from the web and included in the Java build. In this activity, students design tests for a provided Java class before the class methods are constructed using a process called test-driven development. To create a design, the software/system design process, which is a specific case of the engineering design process, is followed. After students create a design, it is implemented and tested and if necessary, the design undergoes editing to make sure it functions by testing the Java class correctly. To conclude the activity, students write the methods in the Java class using their tests to debug the program.

In this task students are asked to describe the data represented in a scatter plot.