Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Hide and Seep
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson introduces students to percolation theory and the possibilities of cellular automata. Framed in the context of a playground which disappears into a sinkhole, students model a...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Matrix Operations
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson shows students how using matrix multiplication can lead to solving real-world problems. In this situation, a painting is missing and the probability of travel betweek five cities...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Escape
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this activity gives students a brief introduction to percolation theory, framed in the context of a criminal trying to evade officers. The lesson makes use of random numbers completing a path...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs of the I Ching
This activity was developed to be used in conjunction with the NUMB3RS episode "Undercurrent," in which a victim is found with a Chinese hexagram tattoo. Students will learn about trigrams and hexagrams, Chinese characters made from...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Close Encounters
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson has students explore how "closely connected" a network structure is. Framed in the context of a terrorist cell, students must find which setups would allow organizations to still...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Ants Go Marching
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson has students experiment and make observations on a directed graph. The lesson is framed in the context of an ant colony which is in search of the best path to get to food. If an...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: How Hard Can It Be?
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson introduces students to one way of defining the strength of an encryption (called "Entropy"). In the lesson, students learn how to calculate the entropy of a given code, and then...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: A Pursuit Curve Problem
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson introduces students to pursuit curves, in which objects follow seemingly awkward paths due to other objects chasing it. In this lesson (which is technology intensive), students...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Riding the Waves
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson introduces students to the idea of vector fields. While no "formal math" is done in this lesson, students will learn to follow a vector field both forward and backward to see...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Regular Polygon Centroids
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson shows students different ways to find centroids of regular polygons. The traditional way (using medians) is presented, as well as the triangulation method, the diagonals method,...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: No Desk Left Behind
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson simulates a situation at a school, in which a principal is determining the number of desks needed in order to accommodate left-handed students. A simulation is used in which 10%...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Dial the Phone
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson gives students some insight into the connection between graph theory and triangular numbers, using telephone networks. Similar to the famous Handshake Problem, students will find...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Logging Witnesses
Charlie determines the probability that a suspect is male or female based on the suspect's height and logistic regression in the "All's Fair" episode of the show NUMB3RS. The lesson includes calculator keystrokes and screenprints to help...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Fours and Sevens, Oh My!
Based off the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson introduces students to the concept of random numbers and shows how human-generated random numbers are not always "really" random. This is done by framing the lesson in terms of...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: The Chase
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson has students develop the concept of pursuit curves, in which one object moves according to the movements of another object. This lesson is framed in the context of an officer...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Fresh Air and Parabolas
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson examines a plane crash, and gets students to try to find the location of various pieces of wreckage. This is done using parametric equations which form a parabolic trajectory....
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Barging In
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson exposes students to equations of variation (direct, inverse, and joint) in the real world, as well as having students work with such equations in the real world context. The...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Breaking the Code
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson introduced students to simple coding techniques (namely, the shift cipher). Students learn to translate codes from nonsense to English by quantifying each letter, and then...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: What Is Random
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson has students explore the conceptness of randomness, and to hopefully squash some student's ideas of what random really is. For example, the lesson points out that in a completely...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Random Thoughts
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson shows students that random patterns often contain seemingly un-random subpatterns. Students experiment by flipping a coin a number of times and then looking for "runs" of heads or...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Onion Peeler
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson introduces students to the concept of changing number bases, as well as gives some insight into Internet privacy through "onion routing." Students translate hexadecimal numbers...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Stick or Switch
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson creates a simulation of the famous "Monty Hall Problem" (also known as the Three Doors Dilemma). In the simulation, students discover whether making certain decisions increase or...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: A Party of Six
Based off of the hit television show NUMB3RS, this lesson use graph theory to examine social network analysis. Students form complete graphs with different colored edges (representing acquaintance or non-acquaintance), and determine how...
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Texas Instruments: Numb3 Rs: Getting in Focus
In an episode of "Numb3rs" called "Harvest," Charlie figures out that an ambulance did not travel in a straight line. Knowing the starting point and the ending point (the foci), Charlie finds the ellipse that shows all the possible...