Grade 8 pupils were asked to write a manual in English for the BeeBot. For the Dutch pupils English is their second language.
In preparation for their task the pupils received a vocabulary list of 20 words related to the use of a BeeBot. These words could be useful in their writing task.
Make the most of your Bee-Bots at school and extend the activities beyond grade 4 by challenging the grade 5 or 6 pupils to design a choreography. This requires programming, communication, collaboration and quite a few other skills, such as spatial insight and the ability to mirror paths.
Here grade 6 pupils are working on their design and testing it out.
BBC series about the history of Electricity by ‘s professor Jim Al-Khalili. Every part is about an hour.
Part 1 – Spark
Part 2 – The Age of Invention
Part 3 – Revelations and Revolutions
And another video on Energy.
The myths and downsides of renewable energy or green energy. How sustainable are the renewable energy solutions?
The Turkey Investigation project is part of a research program by Catherine Fosnot, dealing with inquiry-based learning in mathematics. Grade 3-5 students work on problems related to multiplication and division.
The problem is typically related to the American context. Here follows the short description.
Turkey Investigations, Grade 3–5: A Context for Multiplication invites you into Dana Ostrowsky’s third-grade classroom. Here children explore two problems that are posed separately by Dana. In Buying the Turkey, the first problem presented to the class, students grapple with the cost of a 24-pound turkey that is priced at $ 25 per pound. In the next problem, Cooking the Turkey, students think about how long to cook the 24-pound turkey if, as one recipe suggests, it needs to roast for fifteen minutes per pound. Because the numbers in each problem—the relationship between a quarter of a dollar and a quarter of an hour—have been carefully crafted to support the use of similar kinds of grouping strategies (e.g., grouping four quarters to make a dollar in Buying the Turkey and putting four fifteen-minute intervals together to make an hour in
Cooking the Turkey), there is the potential for students to model the problems in similar ways.
The challenges presented by these two problems to students who are making their first forays into multiplication push students to look for shortcut strategies and support the development and the discovery of specific mathematical big ideas (e.g., the distributive and associative properties of multiplication) and landmark strategies (e.g., repeated addition, skip counting, doubling and halving, etc.). As students struggle with these problems they also develop different ways of modelling them. This includes the ratio table, the open number line, and the double number line. (A. Cameron, S.B. Hersh, and C. T. Fosnot, 2005)
You can watch a part of the series of videos below. This may inspire you to look for problems that are interesting for your pupils and can be designed to challenge them.
In this blog two thoughts on how we as individuals can reduce our digital carbon footprint. Maybe this can be used to challenge ourselves, students and colleagues for more ideas. We start with a few facts.
Data centers are responsible for as much CO2 emission as all air traffic (2019). The communications industry is on track to generate more carbon emissions than the automotive, aviation and energy sector together. Data use doubles every four years (Computerworld Aug. 9, 2019).
The energy consumption of data centers is estimated to be 3.2 % of the total worldwide carbon emissions by 2025 and responsible for a fifth of global electricity consumption. By 2040, storing digital data is set to create 14 % of the world’s emissions. Electricity worldwide is mostly generated using fossil fuels. Some claim that renewable energy could be a solution, but this is a sham. Renewable energy to fuel these data centers is energy that cannot be used for other sectors. So-called renewable energy based on pulp from production forests is only CO2 neutral when looking at a period of 80 years, and that is not the timeline we can afford us now. Pulp plantations often replaced rich ecosystems. Renewable energy such as biofuel often displaces crop production farther into threatened forests, savannahs and peatland. Only a very small portion of biofuel comes from waste fats from the food industry (greenpeace.org).
40% of the energy use in data centers is used for cooling. The industry itself could safe on this part of the energy consumption by moving data centers to cold places, such as Siberia. But what can we do?
We could delete old files that are stored in the cloud, such as e-mail messages, photo’s, videos etc. We and employers should consider to stay away from cloud services. Maybe not so easy, but the easiest solution is not always the best for our planet.
If all US citizens using email deleted 500 e-mail messages which reside in Spam box, Trash bin, or Unread messages, this would save energy use amounting to 33.000 million kilowatt-hours. This equals 3.700 million liter gasoline.
Delete as many emails as possible. Empty your Trash bin.If everyone around the world deleted 10 emails (spam or not spam), this would result in deleting 1,725,00 GB, because storing 1GB emails (or 1000 emails) takes 32 kWh. Consequently, this would save 55.2 million kWh (Good Planet & RESET).
So imagine how much energy would be saved if everyone deleted 10 emails every day?
The map above shows that China is the country with by far most CO2 emission (Our World in Data). So, what can we do about this? One of the reasons is that energy production in China is still mostly relying on burning coal. Another reason is that China produces many products for the rest of the world. How many of these products (plastic toys, cheap clothes, gadgets …) do we really need? And which products can be produced elsewhere with less pollution, less CO2 emission, less transport costs, and under better worker conditions?
Juggling is fun, it’s a nice break, you can do it anywhere, and at any level. If you do not have juggling balls, you can easily make them yourself. See the video below or search YouTube for more examples. Some use rice, others flour. We experienced that making juggling balls from (old) tennis balls is the easiest and gives the best result.
Now you can start juggling. First a video for young kids and thereafter more technical video on how to learn juggling.
Juggling, just like training any physical activity, changes the brain. Read The Art of Changing the Brain or Juggling Boosts the Brain (Nature, 2004). We do not wish to spoil the game, but there is mathematics in juggling. See Math is in the air.
An outdoor workout or boot-camp is a good alternative for the gym, especially in times of corona. Research claims that being physically active every day, has a positive influence on your brain and on cognitive work. Many physical breaks have a larger effect than one workout. Read for example Mike Kuczala’s book The Kinestetic Classroom. Training together is more motivating and more fun. For younger kids exercise should be a game. There are may ways to be active outdoors. Here two suggestions, a video and a program in visualized in pictures. See also the blog about Juggling.
DiScoro 