PD - Secondary Connect - Provoking extended discussion with secondary students to deepen understanding

Provoking extended discussion with secondary students to deepen understanding

Year 7 and 8 Maths Presentations

Today I was very lucky and got to watch Mrs Anderson's Year 7 and Year 8 students from Panmure Bridge School present their maths games.
They have been working on games where they could present anything that they had been learning in maths and they were using Google Slides to make their multi choice games.

Mrs Anderson did the first one to give them the idea.  

Students are allowed to read their prepared notes that are part of a blog post that they have written about the process.
Not only is there the maths skills used in the game, there are animated gifs used as part of it.
They have a rate your game link to get feedback from each other.
The students go up in pairs for support and confidence.

There was a mix of skills here in one activity :-

• Choice of language
• Choice of what Maths skill they wanted to focus on
• Coding, using Google slides to control multiple choice answers
• Peer feedback
• Graphics skills thinking about clarity of font choices and colours used to make their game easy to use.
• Explanation writing in their blogs
• Verbal presentation skills

Here are some screen shots of one of the games from today.

Here is Aung Naing's blog post to see the whole game

What can I use from this with my Year 13 inquiry group who are doing verbal presentations of their design work?

• Let them work together - in the planning of what they are going to say and when they get up to say it.
• Put their work up as a presentation so they are not trying to balance their sketch books or show drawings in a sketchbook to a big group
• Choice of what to present and how to present it.
• Play to their strengths - use skills from other subjects and get input from those subject teachers to help them.

Matariki Presentation

Today the staff had their morning briefing in the Marae to celebrate the start of Matariki.
My NCEA Level 3 students have been using Matariki as the theme for their design project.
We put together a short presentation to show the staff this morning.
The students looked at just one element of their design work and how it related to the Matariki story.
They planned what they were going to say and practiced it before hand.

Here is their presentation - it shows their design work, the influence from Matariki and the verbal presentation that they did.



Here is a video of their presentations (with a bit of me doing the introduction)

Design Talking with Intermediates

Today with my Intermediate Technology class, I decided to approach the start of the designing process in a different way.
We are going to design toys and games that make you think and the first activity that we did was to look at existing products to see what you could buy at the moment. Example blog post here showing what we did. ( I am putting everything we do in the Y9 and Intermediate classes on tis sample blog so they can refer to it to keep them on track and to catch up if they need to - blog post here )

I put them into pairs today and we put a list on the board of games that they play on paper
hangman, noughts and crosses, connect the dots, pictionary and battleships.
Each team had to choose a couple of them and spend some time playing them together.
There was lots of giggling, checking for things online and shouts of "i won"!
I then asked them to have a discussion with each other and come up with ways to make the games they have just played 3D. The ideas had to be able to be played with physical pieces that you move around and not drawn on paper. they could make notes and draw as they talked.



I loved walking round and listening to them. They were so focussed with the task they were asked to do. As a graphics teacher, I LOVED the ideas being drawn, talked about, scribbled out, changed, argued over. laughed about ... They were not bothered about being fussy over their paper work, it was all about the idea and working it out. This is EXACTLY what designing is supposed to be about. Where do they start to get so fussy that every sheet of work has to be perfect? My seniors drive me crazy over this, to the point where I have to physically restrain them from tearing pages from their sketchbooks! How can I encourage my seniors to be more like these teams this morning? Totally focussed on the ideas and not overthinking everything and stressing. We can clean up drawing styles and skills later.

We then sat together round the front table and shared ideas.
I wrote these ideas up on the board and asked questions to get them to think further.

It was a very productive session doing design work as teams. 

Questions for me ....

How can I build more team work into the design process

How can I get my senior students to work like these teams today? 

If you have any ideas while reading this I would really welcome some feedback in the comments.