Where’s the maths in that?
image from http://www.flipcamera.co.uk/
My department recently purchased a Flip video camera from Amazon at my request. My head is full of ideas about self evaluation, presentations, pupil interviews, screencasting, etc – the trouble as always for me is where to start.
So here’s what I’m going to do first.
The main aim is to engage pupils in their learning by making them believe that maths is all around us and truly important to our everyday lives. My target audience is S1-S3.
The plan is to video various scenes in and around Thurso and set the pupils discussion tasks to answer the title question.
I’m going to start with the obvious;
- Retail displays including offers, discounts and deals.
- In the supermarket I’m heading for the fruit and veg aisle for weights, budgets, conversions, ratio.
- Off to the estate agent window for rent and mortgage info which I will follow up with household bills.
- The bank will provide some negative numbers, personal finance and some complicated percentage calculations in the form of compound interest and APR.
- Off down the river for an introduction to vectors which I learned about teaching the cadets last month.
- A wander in the park to look at Fibonacci, the golden ratio and maths in nature courtesy of Marcus du Sautoy and Teacher’s TV.
- Finish with a closer look at some of the buildings and architecture in Caithness – this may well be worth a trip to Dounreay to get the dome close up.
The more I think about this, the more excited I get – again, it’s an idea that has been bubbling around for a while.
If all goes well, I’d like to then send the pupils on a mission to record their own videos – around the school to begin with and then further afield.
What have I missed? Your ideas to enrich this project would be more than welcome.
Many thanks to Tom Barrett and his amazing Interesting Things series.
.
Tags: classroom, Education, Getting Started, interactive, learning, Maths, positive, valuable
Teaching & Learning | admin | 28 September 2009 |
7 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Sinclair, September 28, 2009 @ 10:18 pm
This looks like a great set of ideas for showing the everyday use of maths. Do you want to do anything with speed/distance/time or circles? You’re welcome to come down and film trolleys or air tracks any time.
By admin, September 28, 2009 @ 10:35 pm
Where can I see them in action out in the real world?
Could this be the start of a cross curricular project to prove the use of maths in physics?
Oooh, SDT – can I film the traffic lights and get the pupils to work out the sequence, timing, logistics, how to add in a further junction, best route through town…..?
By Sinclair, September 29, 2009 @ 9:01 am
Well in real world we’d do like you said and analyse the motion of cars but I’d have difficulty justifying pupils out on the road.
By admin, September 29, 2009 @ 9:09 am
All of them?
By Robert Jones, September 29, 2009 @ 6:04 pm
Perfect timing Steph! We just got a couple for our department (courtesy of Tesco vouchers) and are also wondering how to make best use of them. I thought about asking pupils to take the cameras home and film their parents talking about how they use maths in their jobs.
By admin, September 29, 2009 @ 6:33 pm
Very excited about this Robert – we had a fabulous discussion at break about asking friends and family exactly the same thing.
The next step was to take the camera on our work experience visits where we can ask the employer and the pupil to describe the maths they have been using. Not sure about sending the camera home but how about using voicethread or something similar to capture thought to a wiki? Or using a wiki to collate thoughts in many different ways?
Once it starts…..
Could our schools link and share? Bet you’ve not many nuclear scientists too close by?
By Robert Jones, September 29, 2009 @ 6:57 pm
Well actually we do – Torness is just down the road! Sharing would be great though