Some things that I think need to be done in planning activities is to detect any particular outcomes that I am hoping explorers will find. How many questions could they pose? What models are currently available? How many are accessible and to who? What else could be taken from these activities? What meaning could there be to the explorers? What contexts are relevant?
I wanted to get explorers to have a general appreciation of the relationships that exist between sum and difference. I had three representations that I wanted to promote: equations, cuisenaire rods, number relationship triangles.We started with dominoes and dice. Finding matching sums was ok for the group but not ideal as not everyone could actually get one example each time. It was a useful activity but would be better with more dominoes or less people.
We split the group up after the introduction and explored cuisenaire rod number bonds. It didn't work as well with the younger group as they identifying the rods as numbers was a challenging enough step for them and so it wasn't possible to add another task on top. Working with dots on the dice was useful for them. Rita ran their session and it was very successful.
We didn't get around to looking at the idea of difference much. I started some of them on the towers puzzle but it didn't catch.
Explorers enjoy finding more examples, especially if they are in competition with others. It is the next stage of exploring these examples that requires more thinking about. Activities that encourage a decision can be a good start. From there, explorers need to defend their decision or debate it. This shouldn't be too difficult to set up once courses have been initially explored. A discoveries board would be good with some incentive to post ideas there and multiple ways to contribute to the board.
The best thing is to get explorers to find a question beyond what has been presented. I suppose that this can be incentivised or at least promoted as a goal that they can achieve.
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