During a weekend trip to Seoul, I went to a pizza shop in Itaewon selling a wide variety of types of pizza. My friend and I debated over whether we would pizza multiple slices or a whole pizza, and ultimately decided that we would go for slices to try more kinds. Good thing we did since each slice was huge, and 3 slices made up half a pizza! This got me thinking . . . mathematically, this wouldn’t make sense for the pizza shop to even sell whole pizzas at all! This is how I got my idea for a lesson I taught the next day at school.

Act I: What do you notice in this picture? What do you wonder about what you are looking at?

Students discussed that this must be a pizza shop and how the numbers represented the prices. They determined that triangles must mean prices for single slices and circles must mean prices for full pizzas.

Act 2: How many slices do you think the pizza shop should sell in their whole pizzas?

We discussed what they remembered from a previous unit on businesses and how businesses normally price items in order to make a profit.

Act 3: This pizza shop sells 6 slices per pizza. How does this compare to your answer? Do you think the pizza shop should change the number of slices per pizza? Why or why not?