First Thoughts
- Force students to identify angle pairs and their relationships
- Use those relationships to find missing values
- Help students realize that they can find the value of an unknown with no more than one angle pair.
While traditional problems could do the trick for this task, they in my opinion fall short in on very big way:
The Activity
- Students were given a series of challenges to be completed in order
- Information about each of the angles was given one by one as a "clue"
- Students were only given a limited number of clues to complete the activity.
Where This Lesson Fails
In the design of the lesson itself:
- The activity locked students out once they got an answer wrong
- A student could log in repeatedly and answer questions without using clues once they'd seen the correct answer once.
- The CLUES were not thought out. Not only were there staggeringly difficult questions up front but within each challenge clues were not released in an order that would show different levels of understanding.
In the looks of the activity:
- Separate screens were necessary to reveal clues and input answers
- The graph had a generic feel to it. Ideally I want it to be unique to each challenge.
Surprising Results
In my opinion the surprising success of this activity was not due to the activity itself but to two policies I put into place. First, students were assigned to work in pairs on a single computer and were told to discuss with each other whether or not the clues were sufficient before asking for another clue. Secondly, I had the students record all of their work on the template referenced in the description of the activity and collected the papers at the end of the activity. This allowed me to gain insight into which clues students were using to find missing values.
Summary and Next Steps
There are a few changes I want to make:
- Eliminate the "one and done" policy and instead to either a point based system (number correct vs number of clues) or a "three strikes" system.
- Change the format of each screen to make it more intuitive:
- MOST IMPORTANTLY I want to make changes to the clues to reveal information more strategically. My goal is to be able to scroll through student screens and use the clues that were revealed to better understand student thinking. After all, if I can't gain insight to student thinking by accessing the dashboard I am failing to utilize this tool to the best of it's abilities.