How do you get young teenagers excited to learn about right triangles? Northwest ISD teacher\u00a0Tiffany Wood<\/a>\u00a0at Medlin Middle School has discovered if you mix in the right amount of Fortnite, the Pythagorean theorem gains a whole new level of popularity.<\/p>\n Northwest ISD officials visited Wood\u2019s honors geometry class where it was day two of learning about right triangles. Day one focused on learning concepts and rules, and on day two it was already time to put them into action.<\/p>\n Wood, who enjoys playing Fortnite with her family, set up a\u00a0Mystery Royale activity<\/a>\u00a0that had the class buzzing. It was based on Fortnite\u2019s Battle Royale, a game where 100 players enter a game together and play until only one is remaining.<\/p>\n The Mystery Royale that Wood created was a logic puzzle in which students\u00a0worked in teams<\/a>\u00a0to figure out what place seven friends finished in a round of Battle Royale. The activity featured several\u00a0scenario questions<\/a>\u00a0that required solving triangles to earn clues to the logic puzzle.<\/p>\n As students arrived to class, Wood greeted each one at the door and instructed them to open their Chromebook and journal. She quickly explained the activity, students split into teams of two or three, and they were off to the races.<\/p>\n An example of a question was: \u201cJen spotted a loot chest on top of a tree across a lake. While crouched in the cabin by the dock, she used a scope to gauge the distance to the chest. The scope indicated that the chest was 160m from the barrel of the scope. How high in the air is the chest?\u201d<\/p>\n With the correct answer, students got the clue \u201cStar_Fork6 was eliminated first among his friends.\u201d They used a \u201cclue record\u201d sheet to help keep track of possibilities for which positions the seven friends could\u2019ve finished in.<\/p>\n As students worked through the scenarios, Wood was constantly\u00a0moving around the room<\/a>, checking on progress and offering assistance. For a few tricky scenarios, she had drawn\u00a0helpful right triangles on the board<\/a>.<\/p>\n At one point, Wood stopped the class to\u00a0explain the term angle of depression<\/a>, a new concept that would be needed for an upcoming scenario.\u00a0<\/p>\n Groups remained focused throughout the entirety of the class and were constantly\u00a0collaborating amongst themselves<\/a>. Each student had a\u00a0journal in which they sketched out right triangles<\/a>\u00a0and showed their work and problem-solving steps.<\/p>\n When the first group believed they had the correct answers, they\u00a0came to Wood for a check<\/a>. They had gotten all of the answers correct, and Wood promised to buy them their favorite candy bars in the next couple of days.<\/p>\n As more groups finished, they checked their answers with Wood and either went back to make corrections, or cheered being finished and grabbed a piece of \u201cgrandma candy<\/a>\u201d from a jar near Wood\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n As groups finished, they could either help other groups or work on\u00a0extra math activities<\/a>\u00a0on their Chromebooks.<\/p>\n Just like in many online video games, teamwork was of the utmost importance throughout the activity. It was remarkable to see how quickly students put concepts learned just one day prior into action and applied them to actual real-world problems (or at least real Fortnite-world problems).<\/p>\n