Friday, 9 January 2009
Creativity - A Call To Arms
Miss Dooley and myself are in the early stages of planning a project to do with her Year 10 Maths Group and I thought it would be great to invite members of the group, and followers of the blog, to contribute their ideas. The unit of work focuses on reflecting, rotating, enlarging and transforming shapes. There is a certain amount of jargon involved - scale enlargement, projection lines, vectors etc. but it seems that the concepts have lots of visual and artistic applications. My first instinct is to use animation to illustrate the concepts (animation is great for showing movement and transformation), or to use the students themselves to illustrate and explore the concepts physically and film it (maybe from the link and using the concourse for a grid)
Animation can be quite hard to do with thirty students at the same time, but does produce lovely films that can then be layered with music, voice over and text.
One thing I forgot to mention was that Ms. Dooley's group will be asked to make a product that they can use to help Mr Ormston's group understand the topic. What do you think would be the most effective way for the students to achieve this?
Finally, I made a short film using an online teaching resource which I captured from the desktop using IshowU - maybe this could be a starting point?
Soren Hawes
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5 comments:
This sounds like a great project. I remember Mr Davids made a great film about particle theory where students acted out the particles and they were recorded from the link above the concourse. I think this kind of thing would work well but maybe as stop motion animation. Not sure how doing it outside in winter will go down with the students?! What abut making a giant concourse drawing in chalk like the artist Robin Rhode?
Great film Soren. Concepts clearly explained. I also think the istop motion animation would be ideal to show this. The challenge for us is to ensure that the students develop a deep understanding of the concepts involved in transformation as part of this process.
It will be interesting to see how deep the students' understanding is following a more "creative" approach. Is there a way of evaluating the experience or setting up a control experiment to see which kind of experiences produce the deepest learning? How is the topic normally taught? What resources are currently available? What value is there in teachers from different learning areas collaborating on the creation of lessons? Once the students have grasped the key concepts and communicated them to others, what other challenges might they be given to further embed their learning?
A control group project would indeed be valuable - and is the sort of thing that Creative Partnerships should have been rigorously exploring for years. Should/could we use the CP-funded programme to develop such a thing?
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