Students use operations with rational numbers to solve authentic expedition-planning problems by designing, testing, and revising a workable route for others to follow. Across the launch activities, route conferences, weekly gallery walks, and a rehearsal before the Summit Showcase, they use feedback, questions, and setbacks to improve map accuracy, travel-time estimates, checkpoint decisions, and trail-log explanations. Working with route materials from a local hiking-club navigation specialist, they create a final map set, navigation kit, and portfolio that show how their calculations and collaboration shaped the expedition plan.

Students will accurately add, subtract, multiply, and divide rational numbers to solve expedition planning problems involving distance, time, pace, elevation changes, and checkpoint adjustments. They will use maps and route data to create, test, and revise a workable expedition plan with support from a hiking-club navigation specialist, explaining how their calculations affect real route decisions. Students will give and use feedback during route conferences, gallery walks, and showcase rehearsals to improve their map drafts, trail logs, and navigation kit. They will present a final portfolio and route log that shows their mathematical reasoning, revisions, and how they handled disagreement or setbacks during the design process.

Students create an expedition map set that grows across the project: an original draft, a revised route map, checkpoint labels, and clear rational-number calculations for distance, travel time, direction changes, and pace adjustments. They also build a navigation kit with map cards, route notes, and a short route-log script that explains one math problem, one revision made after feedback, and one challenge or disagreement they worked through. Throughout the project, teams maintain a trail log and annotated map revisions from route conferences, gallery walks, and visitor testing with the hiking-club navigation specialist. The final portfolio includes the original map draft, revised map, route log, and a brief reflection that shows how feedback, setbacks, or disagreements changed their thinking and final expedition plan.

Open with a Mapmakers’ Launch Lab where teams rotate through expedition map stations, solve short route puzzles using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of rational numbers, and identify what makes a route workable. Invite a navigation specialist from a local hiking club to introduce real route maps and challenge students to adjust distances, directions, and pace estimates for a sample trail. Teams then create a first-draft expedition plan with checkpoints, travel times, and number adjustments, using quick peer feedback to revise one part before the end of class. Close with a Peak Preview Pop-Up in which students leave sticky-note questions on other teams’ drafts and commit to one route problem they want to solve during the project.

Host a Summit Showcase where teams run interactive map stations and guide visitors through the original draft, revised route, and final expedition plan. Visitors use the navigation kit to test each station by checking distances, travel times, checkpoint choices, and pace changes, then ask questions about the rational-number calculations behind the route. Students present a short route log explaining one math problem they solved, one revision they made after feedback, and one setback or disagreement that changed their final work. Invite the local hiking-club navigation specialist, families, and other classes to review the maps and celebrate how teams improved their plans through critique and revision.