Barbie Zipline and a Rain Delay

A huge shout out to John Stevens and Andrew Stadel whose terrific blog posts made this activity possible. I highly recommend checking out their work first, if you haven't already. Also, thanks to Mrs. B-V who ran this with her Grade 8s at a different school earlier this year, then shared some feedback and a video with me since I couldn't be there to join them. Unfortunately, the Grade 7/8 class I did the Barbie zipline with was at a school that doesn't have a second floor classroom or balcony that we could access. To make the zipline more accessible than using the flagpole we scaled it down a bit and decided to give the students a choice between using the top of a backstop, or swing set as their launch point.

The Setup:

Following John's lead we tried to set the hook by introducing the activity with a zipline video from Nepal. It didn't get the "OOOHH"s and "AAHHHH"s that we were aiming for, but the kids were engaged, and more importantly it sparked curiousity and conversation about ziplining and what would make it fun. Click here for the presentation file we used. After a quick overview of the handout, we headed outside armed with clipboards, pens, a few fiberglass measuring tapes and a goal of designing:
1. A zipline that would be instant (certain) death for Barbie.

2. A zipline where Barbie might get stuck or lack the thrilling experience.

3. A zipline that’s just right so Barbie goes from point A to B at a safe (but fun!) speed.

Here we gave students the choice of where they wanted to setup their zipline.

Me: "How high do you think the swings are? (Crickets) No really, make a prediction. How far do you think it is from the bar to the ground?"

Students: "10 feet?" "18 feet?" "Nah, that's too high." "15 feet." "3 meters." "5 meters." "Hey this is like Estimation180!" "We haven't done that in a long time."

Me: (heart sinks)

Students: "4 meters." "More like 3.5 meters." "12 feet, it's like double your height."

Me: (smiling) Lets find out!

The swing set came in at 10' 9" and the backstop was an even 12'. We did measure in meters as well, but none of the groups chose to use the metric system.

Part #1:

Once they knew the heights they were off measuring, with their partners, how far away the zipline should run for it to be boring, fun, or disastrous for Barbie. Going purely on intuition most of the students had a pretty good idea of what would and wouldn't work. When it came time to calculate the length of the cable needed for the zipline, those that knew the Pythagorean theorem were good to go, and those that didn't were given support as needed. As for calculating the costs, we decided to drop the budget restriction and scaled back the cable costs in an attempt to address a couple of the bugs Andrew had mentioned. It was a beautiful day to be working outside!

Homework:

Students: bring in a barbie doll or other action figure

Me: pick up the equipment needed and enough "cable" for each groups ideal zipline.

I went with mason's line for the zipline, 3/4" pulley, carabiner to connect the zipline to the launch point, conference lanyard for a harness, duct tape to dress Barbie and strap her into the harness, GoPro Hero2 to record each run, one-wrap velcro to strap the GoPro onto Barbie, and a binder clip to use as a release.

Part #2

Before we went outside to do the trials, everyone got their Barbie/figure/stuffy harnessed up, measured and cut the length of line needed, and tied a loop at each end for the carabiner to hook onto and to hold at the end of the run. We went with 2 pulleys and 2 carabiners so that as the first group was getting hooked up, the next group was getting their line ready in an effort to keep things moving. Luckily, we hit some poor weather last week, and were forced to delay the the trials until Friday. The reason why it was good luck, is because I caught this conversation Thursday on Twitter.

This got me thinking...how would we decide which ziplines were really fun? Hello emoji rating sheet! As each pair tested their zipline, everyone rated the ride on a scale of sleep (stuck on the zipline) to medic (crashed hard). Although it's still subjective, it worked for us.

The Results:

Everyone got involved, and we had fun! After each group tested their zipline we returned to class to consolidate and assess which length made for the best possible run. As a whole group we discussed which emoji represented a great run, but we had a 2-1 split between excited and scared. To determine the score for each zipline we totaled the number of votes they received that fell into either of those categories. To wrap up and extend their thinking we left them with the following next steps:
1. What if we wanted to launch Barbie from the 110’ communication tower, how long should we make the zipline to be safe, yet fun?
2. How far away from the base of the tower would we have to anchor the end of the zipline?
3. Design a method to get barbie back to the top of the tower without someone having to climb back up.
4. Design a braking or stopping method that we could use for the tower run.
One of the students has volunteered to compile and edit the footage to make a video which I'll add to this post when he is finished. Until then, here is a clip from one of our runs.
*Update: Video of all the ziplines posted here on YouTube

Now if only I can convince admin that we need to test the student designs from up here on the communication tower.

Epic Bungee Barbie 2015

For a detailed description of the Bungee Barbie lesson you can Google it, or better yet check out the blog posts by MTBoSers Matt Vaudrey and Fawn Nguyen.

Hands down this was my favourite math activity from the past 6 years. Essentially, we just took the Bungee Barbie lesson and made it huge!

The grade 8 students had done the small trials, created their equations, made their predictions, and prepped the Barbies by stringing together a LOT of elastics to make their bungee cords. Then came the big day where we were able to test out their math.

I have to give a huge shout out to Jordan for launching all the Barbies, and for creating the following video of our afternoon. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wcYhJCECqc 

Next time I want to ask this as a follow up or extension:
Assuming Barbie is a 1/6 scale doll, where would this rank amongst the world's highest bungee jumps?

Back to Blogging: My Students Write And I Should Too

No excuses. It's long overdue that I dedicate some time to writing my blog* (Why does "blog" show up with a red squiggly underline as if it's misspelled? Right-click blog, select Spell-checker options->Ask Google for suggestions and then choose "Enable").

Problem solved, everything is awesome! HT Peg + Cat. Okay, I'm done with that tangent, but I do enjoy going off on them, and I want my students to as well or at the very least help steer our class in different directions. This is part of the genesis behind today's blog post.

Wednesday, in my period 3 ENG3C (English, Grade 11, College) class I tried a 5 minute writing activity that I hadn't used since the last time I taught an English course...or maybe was during my student teaching placement, either way it was a long time ago. Each student wrote "This morning on my way to school..." on a piece of paper and then the fun began. I told them:

You will have 60 seconds to continue writing the narrative, and then you will pass the paper to the person behind you, with the last person in the row bringing their sheet up to the first person. Once the sheet has been passed, you get another 60 seconds to read what the person in front of you wrote, and then continue their story. This will repeat 3 more times so that each person in your row will have contributed to the story.

Poor planning on my part by waiting until the end of class to do this, so we didn't get a chance to share after everyone had finished writing.

On Thursday I started by asking my students what they thought of the 5 minute writing activity from yesterday's class. Those who responded were positive, yet critical, which made me smile and it went something like this:
Student - We didn't have time to read them.
Me - We can start earlier in the period.
Student - I didn't have long enough to write after reading everyone else's stuff.
Me - Excellent point...how can we fix this?
Student - Add 10 seconds.
Student - No, 30 seconds.
Student - That's too long.
Me - How about we increase each round by 15 seconds?
Student - Yeah, that should work.

Off we went with an improved version of this creative writing activity. I had them start with "On my way home from school..." while I set the Google timer on the SMARTBoard to 1 minute. Ready, set, go! For the next 8 minutes I watched as the students scribbled furiously across their pages. What amazed me the most were the sounds: The scrawling of the pens and pencils, dee-dee-dee-dee of the timer, the shuffle of the papers being passed, a few chuckles as they read, and then back to the scrawling. All I had to do was add 15 seconds to the timer, and then start it back up. I did provide one additional prompt at the start of the last round that they were the last writer and they should try to wrap up the story.

At the end of the 5 rounds I asked them to pass them one more time so that the original author could read where their story had gone. There were quite a few laughs, a number of puzzled looks, and some questions about what had been written. I then asked for volunteers to share...and it was very entertaining. Some were written well, others were not, but through the sharing and discussion a number of important ideas were brought out. We talked about what worked well or what didn't. We highlighted something from each shared piece whether it was dialogue, lack of fluency, effective description, or a happy ending.

Would I do this activity again? You bet. However, I would start with the caveat that this is meant to be a piece of fiction, and they are not to write about other students (to limit the risk of anyone being bullied). Adding 15 seconds each round worked much better for timing, and sharing the stories afterwards was a great way to get more students to share "their" work orally.

As for my class, they have some ideas on how we could make this even better:
1. Make it a whole class story, which should take most of our 75 minute period. While the class is reading, writing and working on other stuff, one person starts our story by writing for 60 seconds (self-timed), then they pass the sheet on to someone else. The next person reads what has been read, and they also write for 60 seconds before passing it on to someone else. By the end of class everyone should have contributed.
2. For our next round of comfy seat draws*, the first winner has to write one paragraph of a story during class that day. Whoever wins the following day, will read what has been written, and then add their own paragraph. So that after 28 days we should have quite the class story.
*A random name is drawn each day to see who gets to sit in the leather chair or loveseat, and they can invite up to 3 people to sit with them. The winner's name is removed from the pool, and do this each day until everyone has had their name drawn to complete the cycle.