"Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves"
- Jean Piaget
I always looked forward to this activity because it was a time when I actually got to "see" the wheels turning in my students' heads. You see, as they were looking for each item on the list, they measured everything they thought might possibly fit the clue. Many, many, many more items then they would have measured if I was just having them practice measuring a line, or one particular item. And they loved it, because it felt like a game to them!
But it gets better. As they were working diligently trying to find the items, they were having conversations with their partner. MATH conversations. Conversations about why certain items were or were not correct. Conversations about how big a millimeter actually was. Conversations about how to use a ruler and about how to find a diameter.
Their brains were literally churning with the problem solving, and I just loved to watch it all take place. To see them experiencing the learning!
Of course, there where some groups that had difficulty with some questions. For those groups, I would provide guiding questions to help them along:
- "If you aren't sure what diameter means, how could you find out?"
- "If the measurement is in feet, are you looking for something big or small?
The learning that took place during this activity was invaluable and I miss it.
Fast forward to the present:
I've been teaching coding to the 4th and 5th graders here at Neary since last year- using the Robots Dash and Dot, and the Blockly app. Last year, I gave the students coding challenges to complete using Dash and Dot. If you are interested, here are a few videos of what that looked like:
For this year, I wanted to challenge the 5th graders a bit more since they were already familiar with Dash and Dot and the app.
The idea I came up with was to create a challenge called "Dot is Moving". Here is the challenge I gave them:
I knew that this challenge could be difficult for (at least some of) the students. I knew that giving the students an open-ended problem that really required them to THINK could be taking a risk. However, I was excited because I felt confident about it. I was sure that even if it didn't go quite as planned, that it would still be good practice in coding, problem solving and collaboration.
I gave the challenge to the first group of students that I saw for 4 weeks in a row (45 min each time). However, I didn't introduce it until our second meeting. Very soon into the challenge, I realized that we would need more time, and none of the groups would be able to finish the challenge in the time we had together. For the next group, I started them from day 1.
The second group and I have now had two meetings, and it is going beautifully. For me, it's another "Measurement Riddles" activity. The students are problem solving, coding, collaborating and communicating with their Peers. They are EXPERIENCING learning. EXPERIENCING the design process. They are planning, creating, revising plans when they don't work and trying again. They are building amazing lego "trailers" and contraptions to carry Dot and his belongings. They are coding Dash and Dot and testing their models to see if they work. We are having conversations about how to make structures stronger, how to code Dash to turn using the wheel speed because it wasn't working just to have him "turn", and about using a map scale. The students are learning, coding, and having fun! Their brains are churning just like in the measurement riddles activity, and I can't wait to see how well they do with the last part of the challenge!