Tag Archives: Co-operative Learning

Interagency Working, This is Just the Beginning…

Since today was our third day back after the Christmas holidays, I thought it could do with a post about the beginning of the new module. The module is about Interagency or Multiagency working. This, as you can imagine, is highly important for teachers. In the most basic terms, it means professionals in the lives of the children: teachers, police, social work, healthcare workers, community learning officers… The list goes on but those are some of the main ones.

We have been split into groups of 7 or 8. We are to do group activities and go on community visits together. Having met and discussed this with the rest of my group, I am feeling really confident in our ability to work collaboratively with this group. This is a massive benefit, as we have been told that this is not always the case. Clearly, as professionals, we have to simply work with the other professionals in the childrens’ lives – obviously, we cannot allow children to be put in danger just because we do not particularly like their social worker. I believe that the same logic applies here, as we cannot just decide not to work with each other because we do not like each other. I think that it is essential to remember this throughout the module with the group and to reflect on any issues arising.

I think that the main goal for the module is to keep up with the lectures and tutor directed tasks. Of course it is always good to keep up with these things, but for this module there are 6 other people who will be relying on my to do my share of the work in order to be able to do do their own or to learn their own materials. I also would like to set the goal of building a relationship with the remainder if the group, as I have identified the need to be able to speak to each other openly and honestly, especially if any problems arise between us. Towards the end of the module, I will update this post to see if I have managed this.

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Boardgames and Maths… Surely not?

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Boardgames are fun,
There is maths in boardgames,
Therefore, Maths is fun

I’m not sure if that is quite right, but I do know that the second premise is true. Boardgames really do contain maths. On 1/12/15, we were all invited to bring in a boardgame and to play in the workshop, and I’ll admit that I was skeptical about it, but again, I was proven wrong. We talked about where the maths comes into it, and I was not disappointed!

One such example was a jigsaw. We were tasked with finding as many uses for a jigsaw as we could, I could think of:

Grouping
Distribution
Tessellation
Randomisation
Fractions

This makes a lot of sense as when most of us pick up a jigsaw, we tend to split the pieces up by colour, then we look for corners and straight edges and begin to build up the picture. The particular jigsaw we were using was a ‘Where’s Wally?’ one, so we considered distribution in the number people in the picture and then looked for the average number of people in a piece. Another obvious mathematical concept within comes in the form of tessellation, essentially that all the jigsaw pieces fit together to form a continued pattern, which is of course the case with a jigsaw.

Another game we had was Monopoly, the related mathematical concepts in Monopoly and I struggled to think of any. Yes, there is the obvious money, grouping of similarly priced properties, but I felt that there should be more, and they should be easier to find. When in doubt, take to google! I found this blog called ‘MONOPOLY MATH’ by someone called Lainie Johnson {http://blog.keycurriculum.com/monopoly-math/} which gave me loads of ideas, including:

Shape (rectangles and squares on the board)
Numerical orders (Properties are laid out in ascending value)
Probability (Dice)

Or as Lainie sums it up, “addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions, percentages, statistics, probability, interest, patterns, number lines, and basic geometry”

This, to me, is amazing, I love to think that there is still more to discover in the world of mathematics, things that are not abstract beyond my understanding. So from a teaching perspective boardgames are an untapped resource for children. In my experience, the only time we see boardgames in classrooms is during free time or on the last few days of term as a means of keeping children quiet. To me, boardgames could be used far more constructively, to improve maths skills in children. I also think that the activity we did in the workshop, where we had the game in front of us an had to find the maths could be a good co-operative learning activity for groups of children, with perhaps a reward near the end of the week to be able to play the game.

Demand Planning and Logistics

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Myself and Jenny found that we were quite good at this activity…

Demand Planning and Logistics

This activity was an interesting one for me. We paired up and had to complete the activity, based around demand planning. To explain what demand planing is, I found this video was really good at explaining it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuxpzqVX0xI

Basically it is planning ahead how much stock an organisation is going to sell so that there is enough stock available to sell so as to make as much profit as possible. Obviously that is a really simplified explanation, but that is what it is.

We got into pairs and were given a spreadsheet to fill in. We were given €5,000, and had to run a shop. We had to plan what would sell depending on the season and how much of it we should buy. Each season we were told how much of our products had sold and at what price and we then had to decide what to buy more of and what to stop buying.

The mathematics involved was not difficult, but it did require a lot of thought. Some people lost money by ordering the wrong products, such as Christmas selection boxes in the summer season, or ice-cream wafers in the winter season. We also had the option of buying ‘Premium Durian’, which only ever sold around 10-20%, and was therefore not a good buy as it would cost more to purchase than the profit made on them when sold. Also available were items such as beans, bananas and milk, which always sold at a minimum of 70%.

The maths was not the arithmetic involved, we had calculators and it was mostly very simple addition and subtraction. The real mathematics was in the patterns that began to form. It took some of us a a little while to understand this, but we had to be able to see that, for example, bread sales were always high, so investing in bread was a good idea as it always sold, whereas the durian did not sell or only sold very little. Of course it was important to look at the selling price of certain seasonal items in each season, as when it dropped suggested that it was not going to sell as well.

From a teaching perspective this was interest to consider, as on the face of it, it seems to be fairly complicated. However, the more I considered the activity, the more I thought it was one that I may try with children. I think that it could be done as a mathematics activity, but also a business one. It also occurred to e that this could be a really good activity to have children engage in cooperative learning and good to encourage them to take on group roles. I also think that it could be adapted and used in almost any class topic, maybe running a school or a zoo or maybe a park. I think that it would require a lot of build up and the children in the class would need to be given a lot of support. but it is definitely an activity I would try in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuxpzqVX0xI