Last Thursday, Mrs Booth’s stage 3 maths group (15 students) presented their ‘Genius Hour’ maths projects. Students’ had to turn a passion of theirs into a project making connections to maths. Students’ had 75 minutes each Thursday to work on their project with support from Mrs Booth. It was expected that time would also be spent on this project at home. They could build, design, make,film or collect something, for example, and the delivery of their presentation was up to them. The project was challenging for a number of the students as they not only needed to make real world connections with maths but also manage their time well. Students completed reflections each week to help them identify the next step to be completed and where they were wasting their time most.The project topics presented were NRL (popular), cricket second test, Lego statistics, Minecraft maths challenge, how far Mario could jump in real life, artistic gymnastics and angles, fractions and the violin, general mathematics in games design, the impact of polygons, velocity and mass in console game design and finally Formula 1. Two students, who had worked extremely hard during the sessions, were unable to present and will be doing so in week 1 of term 2. Their topics were building a billy cart and cubby house…I cannot wait to see their presentations!
All students did very well and everyone asked if they could do another project next term 🙂 This project was fantastic for allowing the students to work mathematically to synthesise and apply their maths knowledge in meaningful ways. They took ownership of their work and developed additional skills that will assist them to be productive learners in high school.
Here is a video from two of the presentations and Miranda takes us through the different fractions (notes) during the lunchtime Minecraft club session 🙂
Mrs Booth
