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 [my pupils], 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.