Vector! Vector!

You would have thought by the scrunched faces and cries of "this is harrrrrrrrrd" a bit ago, that I was slowly poisoning my students with math torture tools and stunting their growth. I had this "brilliant" idea that I wanted to tie their initial vector learning to video game programming. 

The first day went fine with notes and stickers and basics. Then the next day I thought they could self teach through a packet. It was "fine" except they were to make their own graphs/grids, and then the numbers weren't nice integers, then the estimation was doody, then ..... Drama in the math class! 

I always go back and forth with the, "they're bad at fractions and get worried about "wrong answers" if they're not integers, so I should have fractions in EVERY lesson" versus "Oy! New Topic! Hard enough. Let's not complicate it with fractions."

Anyway. Here is version three of a packet for teaching vectors. I don't know if it seemed to work well because they'd already had exposure, or if it was just effective on its own. I do know that I had to walk around the room and monitor errors and such.

Here is what we did with vectors today. I think in the future (after more torture), I would then give a mess of practice calculations with an answer bank to make it stick in their heads.