Summer School - Science teaching

Margaret Meijers’ website is a wealth of practical information and resources about software (mostly freely available) that supports student learning through higher order thinking. It is at www.mindtools.tased.edu.au

Three that are particularly relevant to my 2008 context are

Scratch is a great little program that let’s you apply animation and other functions to an image. Students get immediate feedback on the impact of the parameters that they set. Lots of powerful mathematical understandings are developed in the process of doing this.

Bamzooki http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/bamzooki/ - a bit like a digital version of the old Crazy Critters children’s game but with powerful control available. One of the really neat things about this (and some of the other tools) is the way the modular scripting components lock together like a jigsaw puzzle. This means that students cannot put together illogical sequences (though there is different learning in doing that of course). By building Bamzooki critters, students are learning heaps of maths, science and logical thinking without necessarily being explicitly taught the material.

StarLogoTNG - http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au/starlogo_tng/default.htm  - this is a neat scripting language.

I am wondering if I could teach a whole Year 7 and/or 8 Mathematics course using these tools. As long as there are plenty of just in time opportunities for specific skill development, and rich visual stimuli around the room, I think it might be do-able. I’d like to test this theory!