Name:_______________________

Date assigned:______________ Precalculus | Packer Collegiate Institute Counting!

Band:________

Today were going to start learning how to count. Like, yeah, you already know how to count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Duh. But were going to come up with shortcuts to counting things. Like, counting without counting. WHAAA? Let me illustrate. How many lightning bolts are there? _____

How many lightning bolts are there? _____

Okay so the way you solved both problems were different. And clearly the second way was way faster. What were going to do is to learn to count without counting. 1. A quick question: A totally made up fact: there were only four different types of dinosaurs: the Iguanodon, the Juravenator, the Allosaurus, and the Gigantosaurus. Each dinosaur came in one of three colors: red, purple, and blue. The Museum of Natural History wants to have a model of each different-looking dinosaur. How many different models does the museum need to create? And more importantly: somehow convince me that your response is correct.

Comment [sjs1]: Have students work on this individually. Talk about the various ways students evidenced it. Hopefully some will have listed them all out, some would have made some-sort of tree diagram, and maybe some would have made a grid (dinosaur kind on one side, color on another) The first method of randomly listing is just random its like the first picture of thunderbolts You might miss one! How do you know youve gotten them all? The other methods are ways of counting without counting talk about how the multiplication fits in there and how it is a nice way to organize your data.

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2. Another quick question: There is one more additional piece of made-up fact for you to consider. Each dinosaur had one, two, three, four, or even five claws. With this additional piece of information, how many different models does the museum need to create? And more importantly: somehow convince me that your response is correct.

Comment [sjs2]: The tree method would work great here. However, the grid doesnt quite work well, because we have to go into 3D. However, talk about what it would look like in 3D. Draw the 3D shape on the board, and talk about what each small volume represents and how it covers all possibilities.

3 (a). Ms. Tramontin gives you a multiple choice vocabulary test written in Azerbaijani.

Comment [sjs3]: A good question for this: What is relevant information from this problem? and What feels like it is irrelevant information?

Gec gyn r ngi var: ___ A. Mavi B. Yal C. Qrmz D. Qara E. Sar

2 +3 = ____ A. alt B. be C. sfr D. on doqquz

Okean edilir:____ A. konfet B. su C. pul D. karandalar

How many different possible tests responses could she get back? Explain!

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(b) Ms. Tramontin gives you a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary test written in Estonian. She puts more words in the wordbank than can be used however no word in the wordbank is used more than once. Fill in the blanks: Koer lks ___________. Oli ____________ in puud. ____________ Lehmad olid lhedal. Samuti oli ____________. Word bank: kakskmmend metsa viima ahvide tiik magama

How many different possible tests responses could she get back? Explain!

(c). Ms. Tramontin gives you a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary test written in Estonian. She puts more words in the wordbank than can be used however the words in the wordbank can be used once, twice, thrice, or even four times! Fill in the blanks: Koer lks ___________. Oli ____________ in puud. ____________ Lehmad olid lhedal. Samuti oli ____________. Word bank: kakskmmend metsa viima ahvide tiik magama

How many different possible tests responses could she get back? Explain!

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(d) Now compare your answers to (b) and (c). Is it significantly better for you as a student to know you cant repeat words, moderately better, or just slightly better? Justify your answer. If you can come up with a way to mathematically express how much better, do that!

Comment [sjs4]: This is a question which asks students to compare two quantities and come up with a conclusion. Coming up with a metric is harder and that could lead to a good class discussion.

4. (a) You are using the URL shortener bit.ly. What it does is it takes a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOVrI9x8Zs and converts it to something smaller and slightly less ugly like http://bit.ly/TpCmH3. Each bit.ly link has a six characters, which include only the letters of the alphabet (and are case sensitive!) and numbers! So bit.ly/TpCmH3 is different than bit.ly/TpCmh3). According to http://bit.ly/QtaFQK, on August 28, 2012, there were about 8.2 billion different webpages out there in Internet land. Could bit.ly assign each webpage a unique webaddress?

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(b) QR codes are similar to URL shorteners, except instead of generating a shorter URL, the URL is encoded in a picture: The way this works is slightly more complicated than Im letting on, but in essence, except for four weird square shapes, each of the small squares are colored either black or white. And so there are a ton of QR codes that can be generated. (In reality, there is some awesome error correction that goes on, where things can be slightly off and it will still encode the right webpage.) For now, assume different QR code images correspond to different URLs. If you subtract out the four big squares (three in the corners, one near a corner) which are used for a camera to position the QR code), there are 872 tiny squares remaining which are each colored black or white. How many different QR codes can be generated?

(c) Which can encode more URLs: bit.ly or QR codes?

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5. New Scrabble game. You play first. You have the following seven scrabble letters. You have a computer at your disposal which will create a list all possible arrangements of those letters, whether they are words or not.1 You will then look through this output to help you! Can you figure out how many different arrangements the computer will list? (And while youre at it, whats the best word you can come up with?)

6. (a) You have the following Scrabble tiles. But you arent playing Scrabble anymore. Instead, you decide you want to find out how many different four letter arrangements can you can create (they dont have to be words so EBEP works!).

Comment [sjs5]: I dont anticipate kids will mathematize this its a small enough number of letters that they will just list them. And thats okay! Well get at these things later when we move from exploration to organizing/solidifying our information.

So how many?

(b) How many different three letter arrangements can you create?

The best word can be found here: http://bit.ly/NoozzQ

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(c) How many different two letter arrangements can you create?

(d) How many different one letter arrangements can you create?

(e) Well go over this in more detail later (promise) but do you see anything different between Problem 7 and Problem 8a? Can you use the same method/reasoning to solve both?

7. (a) How many seconds are in a century (assuming no leap years)?

Comment [sjs6]: Seemingly random question They will probably do it with dimensional analysis. We should talk about it as a tree diagram: CENTURY has arrows to 100 years and each year has arrows to 365 days and each day has arrows to 24 hours and each hour has arrows to 60 minutes and each minute has arrows to 60 seconds.

(b) You are taking a 25 question high-energy particle physics test with 6 choices for each question, and you know nothing about high-energy particle physics. Eep! Scary! How many different ways could you fill in the test? Then write down if that result surprises you, or if it was expected.

Comment [sjs7]: Again, this will be easy. We can talk about this in the tree diagram, or the 6dimensional cube (!) But I like the idea of talking about the ___ ___ ____ etc I like 8a because it puts in context how HUGE the answer in 8b is.

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2 . The deal has you choose two items 8 (a). Applebees currently has a promotion called from their Simmering Soups menu, their Sensational Salads menu, and their Sandwiches and Pasta menu and you only pay $6.99! You cant order two things from the same menu (so you cant get two soups). You love everything Applebees! You want to go everyday until you try every possible combination. How many days in a row are you going to Applebees? [https://vimeo.com/44314536] Justify your response by explaining why you are doing what youre doing.

(b) Applebees decides if you want to get two soups, you should be allowed to. In fact, you are allowed to get two of the same soup! (Similarly for the other menus!) Now how many days in a row are you going to Applebees? Is it a lot different than in the previous scenario?

http://www.applebees.com/menu/pick-n-pair (accessed 10 August 2012)

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9. Mozarts Musikalisches Wrfelspiel (Mozarts Dice Game) A minuet is a highly stylized piece of music in time. Mozart, in his infinite pianoforte wisdom, created a little game where you roll a pair of dice, add them together, and they define a musical measure to be played in the minuet. You do this 16 times, to get the 16 measures. Assume for the first measure you roll a 2. You look on a chart that tells you what to play, and youd play that measure. In this case the chart would read:

Comment [sjs8]: Idea came from John Scammell: http://thescamdog.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/mo zarts-dice-game/

If on the other hand, you rolled at 10 for the first measure, you look at the chart that tells you what to play. In this case, the chart would read and youd play this measure:

A sample chart is below. Even though Ive only placed 8 measures in there, assume your teacher had the patience to paste all the measures in there so every cell is filled with a measure of music!
measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure measure

1
dice sum

10

11

12

14

15

16

2
dice sum

3
dice sum

4
dice sum

5
dice sum

6
dice sum

7
dice sum

8
dice sum

9
dice sum

10
dice sum

11
dice sum

12

Roll two dice 16 times and record your sums:

measure 1

measure 2

measure 3

measure 4

measure 5

measure 6

measure 7

measure 8

measure 9

measure 10

measure 11

measure 12

measure 13

measure 14

measure 15

Measure 16

Go to http://bit.ly/mozartdicegame and enter your results. Ignore measures 17-32 (thats for the trio that comes after the minuet, which we shant concern ourselves with) and listen to your composition (click on Play some Music. You can generate the score sheet for your piece too! You just (kinda) composed a minuet! (With a little help from Mozart.)

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(a) Before doing any calculations, estimate how many different minuets that Mozart can generate with his little dice game. Like, just write a number estimation below. No one will look at this but write all digits of your number out (no exponent notation).

My estimation is:
(b) Try to figure out mathematically how many different minuets Mozart can generate. Do not only get your answer, but explain in words (and possibly diagrams/charts) how you got your answer.

(c) If Mozart was a super fast writer, with his quill and all, and could script out a minuet every minute (see what I did there? Anagrams! Scrabble!), how long would it take him to write out all the different possible minuets? Write your answer in the most appropriate units (is an answer in seconds better, or is it better to give your answer in years? Or something bigger?).

Comment [sjs9]: Putting this huge number in context

(d) Youre tossing dice, which is random. Are you equally likely to get every single one of the minuets, or are some minuets more likely to pop up than others? Explain how youre thinking of your answer.

Comment [sjs10]: Will generate a good class discussion and hopefully well start previewing some prob material where rolling a SUM of 2 is way less likely than rolling a SUM of 6. So the answer is clearly some minuets (the ones with 6s and 7s) are favored and the ones with the 2s and 12s are unfavored. I love this question!!!

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