Day 57... Case of the Missing Laundry

First, let me give a shout-out to Fawn Nguyen... I totally have a Math Teacher Crush on Fawn! She's one of those awesome teachers that I hope to someday be more like! Today's activity comes from this post on Fawn's blog.

In Intermediate Algebra, we've been working on Distance = Rate * Time problems. When I read Fawn's post, I knew I could use the Case of the Missing Laundry, but really feared that my students would be on information overload on the way the problem was originally written. In addition, I wanted my students to use D=RT, not graphing (yet), so I knew I needed to delete the last part of the problem. To help scaffold the Case, I separated each suspect into its own clue and only gave students one page at a time. At the end of the 6 clues, they had enough information to determine who had stolen Mrs. Murphy's laundry. Overall, I think it went pretty well and my students seemed to enjoy the puzzle/mystery aspect of the problem.