ICT in Education

This afternoon was the Buckinghamshire Final for the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge 2006/7.

A month ago to this day was the knockout round which saw the top six primary schools gain their places in today’s final alongside the secondaries. The secondary schools did not have a knockout round as there were only four taking part, although two did participate for fun and to see how they matched up to the primaries. Unfortunately only two secondaries actually came to the final – the other two had not-very-good reasons for dropping out (well, one had a reasonable excuse although it sounded like not much had been done with the pupils on Cars anyway; as for the other secondary, well…)

The primary and secondary schools who did attend the final had a very enjoyable afternoon. It was great to see the children working on their cars using a range of mathematical skills including measuring angles, calculating percentages, working out scale lengths, making adjustments to the engine, the suspension, gear ratios, calculating the fuel required for the race, working out pit stops and tyre changes and much, much more. Best of all, they were actually enjoying it! Yes, children wanting to do maths and enjoying it!! It was a little harder for them too as there was a tight time limit to set up their cars from scratch (they had about 1 1/4 hours) and calculators were banned. The reason for the ban is because calculators are banned from the national final, so I thought this was a good opportunity to give them a taster of what may come. I was amazed at how well they all coped with this and also the speed of some of the teams in setting up their cars – a couple of the teams had finished everything in an hour.

At the end of the afternoon the race was run. Needless to say there was lots of cheering as they watched their cars battling for the lead, along with groans as some of the cars crashed out or ran out of fuel during the race.

After ten nail-biting minutes the winners were revealed. The primary winner was Elangeni School, who entered the competition for the first time this year. The KS3 winner was Gayhurst School, the only independent in Buckinghamshire to take part. Both schools received trophies which I had bought for the occasion. Each school and all pupils will be sent certificates next week as a little memento of the occasion.

Elangeni and Gayhurst now have a fortnight to work on another track setup for the national semi-final knockout round which is run by Cambridgeshire Software House (CSH). I shall be hoping and praying that at least one of these schools does well in this and gets through to the national final in June.

As with the knockout round, I videoed the final with CamStudio 2.0 so that the schools could watch the race with their pupils again and to share this with others in their class. I also screen captured the race report screen for them to see.

Final race video (14 MB zipped)

For me, the hard work on the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge is over for this year. However I’ve now got to start thinking about the 2007/8 challenge and how to get more schools involved. I’m hoping that word-of-mouth from this year’s primary schools will help me to get other primary schools on board. The secondaries are a different kettle of fish though – I don’t know whether it is apathy towards Cars, lack of knowledge or something else that is keeping them from joining in. What I do know is that there are real benefits to using Cars to support maths at KS3 and KS4 and these schools are missing out. Or rather the pupils are missing out, especially the ones who have participated in the Challenge in their primary schools and then don’t get the opportunity at their secondary schools. I just hope that they will make some noises towards their maths teachers about what they are missing out on as this might help to get the message across. We shall see…

Today was the start of the third group of Wycombe and Chiltern & South Bucks primary schools along the path to having their own VLE. The session was an introduction to the whole concept and how Moodle is being used in other Buckinghamshire schools. The sessions this term will be held at The Downley School, who will be one of the schools on VLE journey.

Ian Usher led the session and demonstrated what schools like Buckinghamshire Primary and Winslow have been doing as well as looking at the important but not-so-exciting DfES and Becta documents.

I was rather disappointed at the number of schools who actually turned up. We knew that there were less schools coming to the VLE training this term (due to various reasons including some schools having new networks installed, changes in staff and the usual summer madness of reports, sports days, school productions and reports). However, out of the seven schools who were invited, only three actually attended (and that includes Downley who were the hosts). We were contacted by two schools a couple of days before the session to say they couldn’t make it (they will be trained next term instead). Two schools simply didn’t turn up, so they will have to be contacted to find out what is happening with them.

We will now offer some places to a few of the schools who have already got a Moodle VLE but haven’t had ‘formal’ training (some secondaries who Ian started off through work in school) and a primary or two who only sent one (instead of two) teachers on the initial training.

Another development in support that we are starting this term is a series of Moodle workshops for those schools who have already had the initial training and require continuing support. We will have two of these this term which we will run directly after the training sessions at Downley. We will be using a forum on the BucksGfL website with a thread for each session where teachers can post with issues that they would like help and support on. This will give us an idea before the meeting what we will be tackling (much better than being surprised on the day) and if there are common issues we can possibly create Adobe Captivate movies or other resources to support schools. Of course, if no suggestions are posted then we won’t run the sessions!