By Rhys Baker
Clay Center Community High School (CCCHS) Calculus Students are planning their annual scavenger hunt. CCCHS math teacher Michelle Ware says her calculus class usually has five to 12 students that plan the hunt for the student body. The scavenger hunt is a project that students have planned for the past six years in December. The game is traditionally played during the week of Winter Homecoming when advisory classes compete against each other as a part of the overall homecoming activities. Ware explains how the idea for the Calculus Class Scavenger Hunt started, “We take students to different math contests. At Washburn University, part of what they do is called the Mathnificent Race, and it’s basically a scavenger hunt. Each school is their own team, and they give them a set of instructions. Students go all over campus and count how many windows are in the science hall, and they get all these numbers.And then they come back to the union where everybody’s located, and work through the problems, and they try to get done first.”
Instead of throughout a college campus, Ware’s calculus class leads students throughout the high school building. While the math problems may be simple, Ware says the numbers students use are from familiar landmarks in the high school, “It’s fun to see students ask each other – who knows where that painting is? Because it might ask for the number of flowers in the painting with the old woman on it or the number of letters in the name of the person that donated such and such. Last year, we started using the lockers, and my calculus students wrote questions that would lead them to the locker number and combination. And the first three classes to get their locker open, won.”
Ware says the scavenger hunt also teaches her calculus class that planning an activity is usually time-consuming, but the activity doesn’t always take very long. She compares the preparation to a parade—most of the time, it takes longer for all the parade entries to line up than for the parade to happen.
Ware also requires her Calculus students to include everyone in the scavenger hunt game. She believes it is more fun if everybody has a small part. While everyone may not know algebra, calculus, or geometry, most students know where to find Van Gogh’s paintings in the murals above the lockers.
