@k8nowak Hi! I looked at them a while ago and haven't looked again, so this was a helpful reminder to peruse them more carefully.

Something that is tricky for me about the first couple is that they don't directly relate to the content topics of the course and seem to be applications of middle school content topics. Which could be okay! But makes it harder to make time for them.

I have used a variation of "A New Container" with students, but none of the others. I do like that one a lot because it has a good balance of constraint and openness and has room for creativity, as well as connecting well to area and volume. A few of the others, like "A New Town," feel a bit too loose in that it would be hard for me to come up with a good rubric and support struggling students. And for the ones that are more closed, like "On a Roll," it seems like there's only one method to solve and an exact answer so it feels too constrained and like there isn't an opportunity for students to determine the degree of accuracy between their solution and the real-world situation they are modeling or to compare solutions and (accurate) methods.

I really wish that someone who used some of these modeling prompts would blog about their implementation - it's really hard for me to visualize how each would work in a classroom, where students might get stuck, and what kinds of different responses I might expect. I'm not sure if IM does PD for modeling specifically, but that could be helpful for me.