This week I put out a basket of dominoes on a table in the library. I invited a group of students to make domino trains. I was not sure how this "old school" activity would compete with using the computers and iPads. The students were excited to try their hand at this activity. There were many groans and cheers as the dominoes would fall over and knock into each other. I even attempted an English Language Development lesson on cause and effect with this activity. We generated sentences based what happened with the dominoes. It was definitely a concrete way to demonstrate cause and effect. I could push the students to be more specific with describing the cause and then the effect. What a simple and engaging activity that produced authentic learning opportunities!
Thanks to generosity of Chevron through Donors Choose , my math class experienced a new mobile technology, Ollies! Ollies are programmable robots made by Sphero . We used the app, Macrolab to program the Ollies. I modified a lesson from the Sphero website to teach the concepts of measurement and data. The first day, we explored how to program the Ollies and how changing the variables in the program affected what Ollie did. The students recorded data to capture what they were seeing. On day 2 it was time to be more methodical with our data collection. Students only changed one variable at a time. This allowed students to discover the relationship between time and the distance that the Ollie traveled. The students changed the variable of the delay between the roll and stop commands to develop this understanding. There was definitely a lot of excitement and motivation to learn measurement. On Day 3, we analyzed the data recorded from each group. There were some noticeable differences
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