Fun with The Magic Octagon

So, we are wrapping up our unit in Geometry on rigid transformations, which means it is that wonderful time of year when I show the students Dan Meyer’s The Magic Octagon!

Seriously… have you seen this? (Go through it like a student. Pause it to make your first prediction.)

The Magic Octagon from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Isn’t that cool? Not sure whether you predicted correctly or not (I did not the first time), but I’ve used this video with 6 or so geometry classes and the results are somewhat predictable. 85-90% of the class guesses 10:00. Most of the remaining voters choose 7ish:00 and get called crazy.

Then they see the answer and they JUST… CAN’T… BELIEVE IT!

“Wait… wait. How does one side go clockwise and the other side go counterclockwise?

“No. Run the video again. What did I miss?

That would be a 10-out-of-10 on the perplexity scale, when, like 85-90% of the class gets the math problem wrong and that suddenly becomes a motivator!

Then as they start trying to figure it out, they start making lots of hand gestures, which is surprisingly helpful to them and

 

Then they don’t want you to move on. They want two more minutes to talk about it. Then a classmate starts explaining it. Not all of them get it the first time, but some of the demand to have it explained again.

Then they move on to the second rotation and they feel so confident. You ask for explanations. They give them… quickly. Quickly because they can’t wait to see the answer. And then they did.

And those who got it right cheered! Quite loudly.

Then a boy stopped us and offered a sequel.

“If the front side arrow is pointed at 5:00, would the other arrow point at 5:00, too?”

He turned the tables enough close to the end of the hour that we left with that question unanswered.

 

And I fully expect a couple students to have something to say about it tomorrow.