Coding in Maths.mp4

Direct Instruction

The learning intention for this lesson was for the students to demonstrate their understanding of transformations.

This lesson occurred early on in the term, during a maths unit in Geometry which focussed on position and orientation. We had discussed various transformations, but Scratch provided an engaging and interactive platform for the students to demonstrate transformations on a graph. It also gave the students a chance to explore coding and much of the code used in this project will be required for their end of term inquiry projects.

Extended plan here

Reflection

Using scratch definitely increased student engagement in the topic and it demonstrated transformations far more effectively than what we could have achieved otherwise. We did have some trouble with the noise - many students had a great time playing with the sound and we had a few instances where they had forgotten to use headphones/ had a sound play repeatedly! The next time I used scratch I handed out headphones for those who needed to use sound and we set up a rotation for people who wanted to record themselves speaking. I also went a bit overboard with my explanation of why they shouldn't create their own character to begin with (due to the time constraint).

Things to note

I had to relaunch this lesson for students who had not used scratch before; as the students had a limited amount of time to complete the activity, I gave them some more information to give them a head start and get them more familiar with the programme. It was also quite tricky to capture the student interactions as it was an independent task and the majority enjoyed figuring it out for themselves rather than asking for help (which I thought was fantastic).