Why we Love to Cheat in Maths

I have recently been given the gift of a Year 10 Maths class. Their teacher left to work in another school, so after having relief teachers for a while, they came to me full time.
It has been definitely a different challenge for me to work online with a subject that is not my own.
I decided straight away to make my own Maths Google Site rather than use the one that the class teacher had already made. That would be like using someone else's planning and not doing it myself. If I was going to be invested in this class and how they were doing, then I needed to do it myself.
Link to their class site is here.

The work we are doing at the moment is algebra and we are onto multiplying and dividing powers.
The first thing that we did for this was to design Super Heroes.
Here are some links to some great online apps to do this :-

Hero Machine Link 1

Hero Machine Link 2

Hero Factory

We posted these Super Heroes on the class blog as they were making them.

Link to the class blog here.

Here is an example of one of the Heroes that they made.

The next task was to use these Super Heroes in a battle, so they need to be given their powers.

The students helped me to put together this battle zone on a Google Drawing.

Link here

They were not not happy when we first made it as there was only 6 Super Heroes to choose from. So they made ( and found ) more!!

To play the game, you use the random number generator on the site to choose 2 opponents on each team. They then have to work out who would win.
The Super Heroes are multiplied together so the powers have to be added.
Later, they had to throw the "dice" again - 1 for multiplying, 2 for dividing, to add to the algebra use.

The random number generator on the class site was supposed to stop the cheating, so of course they found new ways to cheat.
As they had to make a copy of the battle ground in order to use it, they had control of the power numbers. Team powers were changed so that they would definitely win the battle.
This is great cheating, as knowledge of the algebra skill we were covering has to be in use for the cheating to work. I love it!!

The example here shows how the student put his on one side with a wildly exaggerated power with all the others on the other side... his working out is faultless....