My RADical day

Here is a lame little activity that I came up with last week in the shower. It is called "My RADical day" (Alternately, my PI day) designed for the Pure Math 30 Trigonometry unit.

In this unit, students are required to play around with radians <-> degree conversions. A fun (cross-curricular!)way to do this is to get students to create a little story about their "RADical" day.

Here is the gist of the assignment.

(reminder 360 degrees = 2pi radians)

Time is measured on a clock. One complete rotation (or shall I say a 360 degree rotation) of the minute hand signifies one hour in our daily lives. Mathematically one can say that when the minute hands rotates to an angle of 2pi radians, it has completed a full rotation (1 hour has passed).

So at midnight, on a mathematical clock, the time would read 0 pi
At 1am, the clock reads 2pi
At 2am, the clock reads 4pi
At 3am, the clock reads 6pi
.....
At noon, the clock reads 24pi
At 11pm, the clock reads 46pi

The idea is for students to create a schedule of their day.
ie:
07:00 Wake up
07:30 Eat Breakfast
08:00 Catch bus to school
09:00 School starts: Social Studies class
15:30 School is over, get on bus, go home

They then have to take the time in hours and convert it to radians.
ie.
14pi wake up
15pi Breakfast
16pi Bus
18pi School starts
31pi Go home

Once they have their day scheduled in radians, they then have to create an interesting re-telling their "RADical" day. Students can get creative by incorporating little details like "I had pi/8 of a pizza for lunch" etc. They can choose to present the story of their day in whichever medium they prefer: Movie, Poster, Power Point, Comic life, Flash, etc (preferably using some form of technology)

Once students have completed their project, they then have to trade with another group to analyze their story. The group has to take all of the radian times, and then convert it back to "normal" time.

This project is just a fun and silly way work with radian - degree - time conversion. It also plays a significant role in helping students visualize radian angles if they can relate it to a clock.

Thats all I have so far. Just ideas. I might try to create something in IO for it soon, but for now, my focus in on finishing the last 3 assignments for my BEd!
Woot Woot!