As a middle school teacher for the past 11 years, I have found that many of my students struggle with interpreting solutions to a problem. Often when I ask for justification, a student would say, "because the calculator said so." This has always prompted me to challenge my students to be "smarter than the calculator." Calculators are powerful tools, but you can't always stop with the result you see on the screen. The context of the problem needs to inform decision making about what to do with the calculation.
Smarter Than The Calculator is a collection of problems that asks students to make sense of the context of the problem. Often times, the calculation on the calculator results in an answer that needs to be interpreted.
For example:
Can you have .9 of a penny?
Can you have part of a school bus?
What does a remainder mean?
How can you represent a decimal, fraction, or percent in different forms?
Is it always best to simplify a fraction?
These problems show a calculator with a correct calculation, however the answer is not quite right for the context. Students need to interpret the result and use it to find a solution that makes sense for the situation.
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