Points, lines and shapes 1 evaluation

Perpendicular!

The Brixton sessions have a very different character to Tulse hill. We are in our own room so no one can see what we do and we can use the space much more as we like.
My plan for floor space has on occasion led to other ideas for activities much like today's block and roll idea.

It was very much a workshop style session today.  We had some nice elements such as the parallel/perpendicular call which should be a feature.  One explorer called out regularly and others started getting into it at the end.

Finding parallel and perpendicular examples in the room was ok but would have been much better in the playground.

The triangle investigation was not as thorough as I had thought it might be but I misjudged the time it took.  We didn't get many doubles ( I think two explorers did a different 7).  But it would be good to mock up a few straws on 7, 8, and 9 and see if they can get more than one triangle by moving them around.

We talked a bit about the history of right angles and historic ways of creating them.  I hoped to get on to creating a grid on the floor using parallel and perpendicular lines but didn't get a chance to do that.  Instead we played block and roll using paper.  This was quite a good way to do it though as it was a better place to introduce the game.  They can practise online and we can try to create the grid next week.

We didn't get to use rulers but we started to see the use of set squares and we can use set squares that we make ourselves.

Games focused session evaluation

One of the challenges I face in this and perhaps all of the sessions I facilitate is to figure out my role in the growth process. Both of the sessions this week gave me an opportunity to reflect on this aspect. These are some of the roles I picked out.

Challenger
Ideally I would like my main role to be to set challenges that take care of themselves. An Explorer gets a vision and embarks on the mission. This was most evident in the straw challenge where the initial challenge was set and then they went off and tried different things to achieve the tallest tower possible.

Setting the challenge with the rubik's snakes to create a square worked well in this regard.  On Saturday E and J discussed ideas about why it could or might not be possible

Ideas board

Our twin explorers are fantastic and so advanced for their age.  And so different. Chatting about ideas with Will was very cool.  None of them were very mathematical but they were linked to the activities at least initially.  But it gave me a chance to see more about his way of thinking and I assume it gave him more of a chance to be heard and find out something that was relevant to the moment.

Encouragement
this is mainly in the planning of the process of the session.  I am trying to gamify the workshop to the extent that explorers try a range of activities and review what they have done.  I am attempting to do that by a levelling up scheme where comments are reviewed and both reviewing and having well reviewed comments gets explorers points that lead to levelling up.  Still in progress.

Authority
We had problems this week with a couple of explorers going a bit wild before I got there.  It is fairly clear that it is getting close to the time when I'll have to move this session on to another venue as there we are quite limited there and it's clear that it is becoming a strained relationship but that's another point.



This is a strange role and one I'm exploring as I need to be able to influence some of their decisions about exploration but many of them clearly would not accept if it went against a decision that they have already made.  This is a good thing up to a point and I need to make sure that I distinguish that line.

To Provide examples
We started by playing split 3 ways on paper.  This was not a problem for many of the children but some needed help getting some numbers to start playing with.  Once they had the idea that I could help them to get numbers to play with, those that needed this were comfortable asking for this help and would then get on with playing the rest of the game.  I gave examples some times as a demonstration with blocks, sometimes working out the answers and sometimes just checking

Games Focus
I think that focussing on games development is a really useful way for me to see these sessions.  I don't need it to be the explicit focus for explorers, just to be there as a way of framing my planning of the session.  It will be useful to see how it works for this term.