The Car That Passes
A class from Culford School in Suffolk
UK all sent in a paragraph or two explaining how they went about
this activity. You can read everything they sent in this Word
document or this pdf.
I was so impressed I contacted the teacher to
congratulate the pupils and to find out about how the work started.
This is what he wrote back;
I used the challenge with the top sets in years 6 and 7,
deliberately choosing an easier (2*) open-ended task to allow them
to take it where they wished. This is something I do quite often
with the puzzles on the website as it allows an accessible start to
be taken as far as possible. It was introduced in the classroom
with the webpage up on the Interactive White Board so that they
could keep referring back to the original challenge whilst
discussing it in their groups and we could scribble on it and
highlight keywords. As you can see from their responses we covered
all sorts of eventualities from what happens if a car doesn't come
at the right time or if loads come on a car-transporter up to what
if the world ends on Sunday and does that make our prediction
invalid! The pupils decided on their strategy, location and time of
testing and the older ones devised the spreadsheets for the
surveying that were then used by both classes, with varying degrees
of success. They then collated the information into bar graphs and
pie charts before making their prediction.