Category Archives: Investigations

Building our understanding

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Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In 6HU, we are aware that learning is an ongoing process. It is not a case of the teacher telling us something, and us remembering it. We continually build on what we have discovered, creating our own meaning over time. We are showcasing this trait this week, by sharing our learning journey on the topic of cyberbullying. We reflected on a post we made last week, and expanded on those initial thoughts. Some of us chose to make this elaboration more meaningful by presenting using audio or video.

Here is a selection of links from our class:

Maggie

Ellaina

Billy

Chris

Henny

 

 

BattleShip Maths Part 2

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We evolved our previous game of battleships, trying to create a ‘perfect game’. We thought that there needed to be more player involvement in the game and that it should be designed so that there was always one winner. These are the variations that we came up with

  • all players start on a square.
  • after every five squares are called out, the players who are hit leave the board, and the remaining players can move to any other square on the board that does not have another player in it.
  • this continues until there is a set of five squares called and no players get hit.
  • at this point, remaining players occupy two squares with their legs straddling a divide.
  • squares are now called one at a time until there are two players only remaining.
  • The last two players occupy four squares each and squares are called until both players have all four of their squares hit.

We played this several times and we are confident it is the best variation that we could hink of.

By Chris, 6HU

 

Battleship Maths

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As a follow on from our Zombie Maths activity yesterday, we played class Battleship in Maths today. We got the idea from William Chamberlain who commented on our post and shared his class blog post about his class learning the same type of Maths. As a nod to this international sharing, we decided to give his lesson a go – with a few changes.

Our Battlefield

First, we marked out a 5×5 grid on the carpet and labelled the axis.

 

We started the activity with the students laying out their ‘ships’ on their own 5×5 grids. We had a 4, 3 and a 2 square ship to lay out on the grid anyway we liked. Then we placed our ‘soldiers’ on the grid squares one by one and the students marked them off, much like a game of Bingo. We decided to award both the first and the last place getters, as the ‘winners’ would be the first to have their ships sink, and the ‘losers’ would be the survivors!

After this first game, we found that most of the class were finishing at the same time. Putting a gamification hat on, I asked the students, how we could change the game to alter the way the results played out. Ideas included fewer players, more squares and a different number of ships.

It’s a hit!

What impressed me the most was an idea that suggested the outcome be altered. There were 25 squares, corresponding with 25 students in the class. The suggestion was to give everybody a square, then there would be only one winner. It was proposed if the fairness of the game could be altered by

Placing the soldiers on the grid

letting players choose their own square or whether the players should announce their square to other players. I was noticing that the game of Battleship had evolved into the design of a fair chance game. This impressed me because it showed the kind nature of my students in wanting the game to give equality to all participants.

The irony of this in a competitive context was not lost on some of my more ‘enthusiastic’ students who

‘complained’ that this wasn’t really a game anymore, as there was no strategy, only pure luck. I pounced on this as an opportunity to have the class define in their own way ‘what is it that makes a game?’ and how we could change the rules and parameters of our ‘Battleship Activity’ to create the best game we could.

I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with!

One of our brave soldiers

 

Note: We have updated the rules here.

Experimenting with Electrical Circuits (Science)

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In today’s science lesson, we were given the task of experimenting with batteries, lightbulbs, wires, pins, motors, rubbers, digital multimeter and a variety of other things.Some children decided to experiment with resources they had never seen or heard of before. We were told to experiment with any metal objects we could find. A small group of girls specialised in making long circuits, including more than three main objects. Two boys decided they would go with short circuits, but using different resources, such as scissors, paperclips and wood. Everyone managed to make a completed circuit work. Here are some photos of our science lesson.

By Henna Penna

 

 

 

 

 

Fake Book

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Your Humanities task this week is to make a ‘FakeBook‘ account for your ingenious thinker.

You will need to pick appropriate ‘events’ from your thinker’s life and make them the posts. How others reacted to these events will be comments for these posts.

Think about what sort of information your thinker would want to share with the world if they lived in an era of social networking. What would they keep secret? Who would they be friends with?

Have fun… and post the link to your post as a comment!

 

Creative Commons

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We had a good discussion about copyright and creative commons from watching these videos…

and this one from the Creative Commons website.

Please write a post on your blog under the ‘Digital Citizenship’ category and post the link here. You need to describe what you understand by Creative Commons and include an appropriately sourced image.

Circuits

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In science we have been inquiring into electrical circuits. Today we learned that there are parallel circuits and series circuits. In a series circuit if a light or motor blows, then it stops the whole circuit but in a parallel circuit it would continue. We were doing wet lab, dry lab with circuits when Rohan and I (Brandon) did an extension and attached a rubber to an electrical circuit’s motor. We then made a video of us using our invention to rub out a bit of writing!

Brandon & Rohan


 

Digital Citizenship Reflections – Geo Tagging

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Access this site and explore. Consider the benefits and dangers of geo-tagging. Write a reflection on what you discover and post it on your blog. Comment on this post with the URL from your blog. Consider these questions when writing your review;

1. What have you learnt about Geo-tagging? Discuss the benefits ad dangers associated with geo-tagging.

2. Write a response to the Wise Up To It Video: Jeremy’s Friend. What lessons can be learnt from Jeremy’s experience?

3. In your reflection please consider any lessons we have had this week that have added to your understanding or our Unit of Inquiry “Digital Citizenship”.

Happy Blogging!

 

PS Please note this is a DIFFERENT task from the weekly individual inquiry posts based on this and Lauren’s Ordeal.

Calendar Investigations

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The results we found

We have been investigating number patterns, and the phenomena that we observe. Our task was to look at a ‘square’ of dates from a calendar and investigate the sums of the dates as we added horizontally, vertically and diagonally. We found that the total sum we found was the same every time, because it was the same four numbers that we were adding together. It fooled a few of us, though!

Please look at our individual student blogs to see our own write ups.

 

Thank You for reading.