Ready for the weekend

It’s Friday afternoon. The students come bounding into class, exhausted from their busy day and excited for the weekend. The perfect opportunity to do some maths… Yeah right!

Today I tried something different and I was surprised by the result.

As the students came into class, they each received a piece of paper with a letter and a coordinate point.

Their instructions were projected onto the screen, via Google+:

The students were up for the challenge and the class of 16 soon formed into 4 groups of 4 students.

In class during the week, we had been using Coordinate Geometry to justify what type of quadrilaterals were formed, given four points. In particular, we had been working with distances, gradients, parallel lines and perpendicular lines. This cooperative activity was a good test to see if they could apply their recently acquired mathematical tools.

Three of the groups quickly realised that this seemingly innocuous activity was going to require a lot of calculations. Team leaders emerged and delegated calculations to their groups. The most efficient group had two team members calculating distances between points, one team member calculating gradients between points and one team member using Geogebra to double check that the number crunching was on track. I was very impressed at how these teams functioned as groups and how little instruction was needed for them to complete the task.

One of the groups, however, needed more support and encouragement to get all the team members involved and participating. They were the slowest group to solve the problem and, talking to them after, they commented that more teamwork is needed next time for them to improve.

The quickest group finished the activity in about 35 minutes, at which time they had to present their working and findings to me. Their justification was missing their perpendicular calculations. This was quickly rectified and they finished the lesson by working on an extension activity, that involved having three points and calculating the third to make a parallelogram.

At the end of the lesson I asked for student voice and they told me that it was the hardest they had worked in maths on a Friday afternoon, they also said that they wanted another challenge next week!

I want to use more cooperative learning activities, to improve communication between students and to build teamwork skills, and I may have found a good period to do it.

Improvements that I would make if I did the activity again include;

• Not selecting groups randomly, to make sure that all groups have mixed ability
• Making sure that all shapes are a similar difficulty (one of the groups had to prove a kite, which we had not spent any time on in class)
• Having the extension activity ready to go

Now for my challenge, what cooperative learning activity will we be doing next Friday afternoon?