A Rich Task

Over the last 2 periods with my S2 class, we have been working on the Counting Cogs task from Nrich, using the groupwork roles suggested by them. 



I plan to use this task as an introduction to multiples, factors and primes in our new  CfE course, so I was really using my S2 class as guinea pigs!

The task was genuinely rich: the pupils came up with many conjectures which I had not predicted. Here are some snippets of the artifacts they produced:



I was particularly pleased to be able to discuss the "failed attempt" and convince the students that it wasn't really a failure at all. It was really a great bit of evidence of the scientific method in practice. They could have improved their recording by showing how they found out that it wasn't true (by making a prediction based on the conjecture, then finding that it didn't work).

The pupils were using words like multiple, factor and prime without any prompting from me to do so. I think this task would work very well as an introduction to these concepts.

Comments

  1. fearghal1 June 2010 at 14:35

    This looks like a great way of introducing a concept and seems to be really challenging and engaging.

    Another interesting post which provides another fascinating glimpse of your practice & thoughts - thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Best Class Ever at Jonesieblog2 June 2010 at 18:37

    [...] A Rich Task [...]

    ReplyDelete

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