Hooks

What is a "Hook?"

A "hook" is a question that (hopefully) motivates students to work through the drudgery of acquiring some basic calculation skills so that they can later be applied to solving more interesting math problems. They often also illustrate the connection between mathematics and the "real" world.

Hooks only work if they are eventually followed up by the teacher showing the students how mathematics can be used to answer the question posed.

Differential Equations ....

"Y'know how on all those police shows the coroner arrives at a murder scene and says to the detectives: The victim was murdered yesterday between 2:00 and 2:15 am. How does she know that?"

Sample Problem
According to Newton's law of cooling, the temperature of an object decreases at a rate proportional to the difference between its temperature and that of the surrounding air. Suppose a corpse, at a temperature of 30oC, is discovered murdered in an industrial cooler at 6:00 pm where the temperature is kept at 10oC. An hour later the corpse has cooled to 27oC. Find the time at which the victim was murdered if normal body temperature is 37.5oC.



Contributed by Darren Kuropatwa.