This week in Algebra 1 we covered the topic of percent of change, which is one of the many Algebra 1 topics that is covered in middle school but gets revisited in high school.  The concept of percent of change isn’t too challenging, even when working backwards to find an original or final value, but, geesh, it can be boring.  I looked around online and couldn’t find many activities for this topic, and the ones that I could were really geared toward lower middle school grades, so I decided to make my own version that is great for an 8th-9th grade class.

There are 17 problems that are to be posted, alphabetically, around the room (get creative, though!  can you hide any?).  Students work in pairs, each student getting their own work recording sheet.  Each pair of students also gets a path recording sheet, so they can track the order of problems they’ve gone through.  Students can start at any letter, that way you don’t have 30 students starting at the same place (I normally have a 4 person limit per letter).  Whichever letter a pair of students starts at will be the first letter added to their path recording wheel. They will solve the problem at the bottom, and then look around the room at the tops of the other letters until they find the letter with their answer printed on top.  Then, they go to the new letter, record it on their path recording wheel, and solve the problem at the bottom of the page.  The process repeats until the student makes it back to the letter they began at.

You can download the PDF and editable PowerPoint version of the scavenger hunt here.  You’ll need the fonts Wellfleet and HVD Comic Sans if you want to edit the PowerPoint file.  Otherwise, the PDF is good to go!