Motivate Long Projects 2007-08
Discovering Maths and Science
Experiments in Astronomy
International partnership
Reading between the lines: Communicating with codes
Work and play: Disease spread, social behaviour
and data collection in schools
In these extended projects we want to:
- enrich the mathematical and scientific experience of the students
and teachers involved
- give students and teachers a sense of belonging to a mathematical
and scientific community
- give students and teachers an opportunity to go beyond the normal
curriculum and to use techniques from the curriculum in unfamiliar
contexts
- help students see that maths and science are relevant, living subjects and that they have many interesting links to other curriculum areas
- provide extended projects which will help students develop creative
and critical thinking and problem solving skills
- provide project work which students can work on collaboratively or
alone
- give students an opportunity to present their own work to an audience
outside their own school, to answer questions and to receive feedback
on it
- help students develop their communication and presentation skills
More about our philosophy and conferences
Most of these projects will last from September 2007 until summer
2008; Experiments in Astronomy will last from September 2007 until March
2008. In each case, there will be a preliminary teacher briefing via
videoconference for participating schools and then two student VCs per
term (so a total of either 6 or 4, depending on overall length). In addition,
we will provide extensive project work on the topic for students to work
on outside the VCs and to report on at the second VC of each term. Each
project will have four schools or groups of schools participating, some
of which may be international centres. Please note that if you put in
an application for a group of schools one school should take responsibility
for organising the project, and your group will be treated as a single
centre during VCs.
You are welcome to choose as many of these as you like. The online registration
form will require you to put them into your preferred order - if you want to participate in more than one long project, please make this clear.
Please
do not choose any project on which you would not be happy to have a place. At
this stage, we cannot guarantee that a particular project will run -
to run a project, we need multiples of 4 participating schools, except in the case of the UK/Pakistan partnership where we need 2 participating UK schools - and
we therefore need to be able to allocate schools to any of the projects
in which they express an interest. Nevertheless, we will do our best
to ensure that wherever possible you get your first choice.
We do not usually specify an ability or achievement level for our conferences,
since we hope that the majority of students of the appropriate age can
participate, although they may well work at different levels. We offer plenty
of choice in the project work for each term so that teachers and
students can choose areas which interest them and are at an appropriate
level of difficulty.
To apply for a place you will need to:
- Submit our online registration form.
- Send a signed hard copy of our Booking Confirmation form to Julia Hawkins, Deputy Director MMP, CMS, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, or fax to Julia Hawkins,
01223 765900.
- Arrange and complete a satisfactory VC test with Adrian Cullum-Hanshaw (01223 764278 or 0774 703 5984) if this has not already been done by your school.
As soon as we have 4 schools registered for a Long Project, we will send Agreements to them all - this will commit us to providing the Project and you to doing it.
Target age ranges and costs are shown for each project
below. If you want further information about any other aspect
of these projects, please contact us (Jenny
Gage).
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Discovering Maths and Science
Duration of project: September 2007 - June/July 2008
Number of student videoconferences: 6
Target age range: 11-13 years
Total cost: £1500, payable in three termly instalments per school / centre
Relevant curriculum areas: maths, science, technology
In this project, we will use everyday situations and materials to investigate
the mathematics and science all around us. We will also consider the
ethical implications of the topics we investigate. Areas we will explore
include:
- how we travel to school
- distance and speed
- how fit young people are today compared with previous generations
- simple technologies such as pumps
- manufacturing a small item out of waste materials
- planning and organising production of an item to sell for a charity
and much more!
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Experiments in Astronomy
Duration of project: September 2007 - March 2008
Number of student videoconferences: 4
Target age range: 10-12 years - this conference is intended to be cross-phase and
we will therefore only accept bookings from schools who will be using it to link
Y6 primary students and Y7 secondary students both for the VCs and also for the
follow-up project work
Total cost: £1200, payable in two termly instalments per linked group of schools
Relevant curriculum areas: science, maths, astronomy
In this project, students will have the opportunity to experiment with
some of the ideas and tools that astronomers use to make discoveries
about the universe - we will use simple experiments to investigate mathematical,
scientific and astronomical concepts. We will begin with the Earth, Sun
and Solar System and move on to talk about the stars and learn about
other objects in the universe. Projects will include topic areas such
as:
- measuring distance
- sizes and shapes
- colour and light
- life on other planets
- black holes
- galaxies.
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International partnership
Duration of project: September 2007 - May 2008 ( Pakistan
schools are on holiday in June/July)
Number of student videoconferences: 6
Target age range: 12-14 years
Total cost: £2000, payable in three termly instalments per school / centre
- the cost of this project reflects the fact that only 2 UK schools will be
able to participate in a cluster, and we need to contribute to the costs of
the schools in Pakistan.
Relevant curriculum areas: maths, citizenship, geography,
science
We have been running long projects bringing together UK schools with international partners for three years now. For 2007-08, we still have a place for one
UK school who would like to be partnered with a school in Karachi, Pakistan. The topic will involve all aspects of data handling and will
have a strong cross-curricular emphasis.
These projects will give schools opportunities to:
- exchange information with their partner school
- use this information for a variety of cross-curricular projects,
including statistical analysis, scientific data collection, creative
work of all kinds, comparison of geographical areas, comparison of
local vegetation or animal life, citizenship issues, ...
- in the first term, we will focus on similarities and differences
in lifestyle for young teenagers
- in the second term, we will focus on similarities and differences
between the areas in which the participating schools are situated
- in the final term, we will focus on similarities and differences
betweeen Pakistan and the UK
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 Reading between the lines: Communicating with codes
Duration of project: September 2007 - June/July 2008
Number of student videoconferences: 6
Target age range: 11-13 years
Total cost: £1500, payable in three termly instalments per school / centre
Relevant curriculum areas: maths, history, language (English and/or other)
- When did people start using secret codes?
- What kinds of codes have they invented?
- How do you decode a secret message?
- Is there such a thing as a totally secure code?
- How are codes used to communicate and check for errors?
These are some of the questions we will be considering in this project.
As well as finding out the history of codes, students will have clues
to solve and coded messages to crack. We will also encourage them to
send each other coded messages to decipher. In addition, a genuine World
War II Enigma machine will be demonstrated to the students.
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 Work and play: disease spread, social behaviour and data collection
in schools
Number of student videoconferences: 6
for secondary students, 2 for primary students
Target age range: secondary students, probably in Y10 and
Y12 (but any students whom the school feels would benefit from such a
project would be welcome - it could be that different students are involved
in different aspects of the project), primary students of all ages
Total cost: as participation in this project will be part of
a research project, we are offering this opportunity free to schools. It may
be possible for schools to get a small grant from the Royal
Society to
cover their own costs in addition.
Signing up for this project:
We have applied for a research grant to support this project, and the precise
starting-point will depend on when we hear about this. We will
also need to have schools in different areas of the country, and with different
size primary schools. Schools who wish to sign up for this proejct will be sent a questionnaire
to enable us to choose schools so that we maximise the value of the data we obtain.
Relevant curriculum areas: maths, science, history, PSHE
The project will provide opportunities for participating school pupils
to explore topics related to
disease spread, mathematical modelling, data collection and conducting
research studies. There will be VCs with research scientists
from the disease dynamics
research group, collaborative project work involving secondary school
students working with their feeder primary schools, and school visits
by the research team. A range of issues will be explored, including:
- the importance of understanding disease spread
- advantages and
disadvantages of vaccination
- ethics of data collection
- practical issues in data collection
- analysis of datasets.
Secondary school students will be involved in designing
and developing a
questionnaire to determine mixing patterns in primary schools, with a
special focus on the levels of
interaction within and between classes. They will also be involved
in preliminary analysis of the data and presenting it to others. The
research team will co-ordinate the schools' work and also show students
and teachers how a large-scale research project works. School participants
will be given the opportunity to take part in grass roots science, developing
and carrying out their own research project, and the .iInformation gathered
will be available to feed into university-level scientific research as
a novel and exciting dataset.
It will be possible to relate much if not all of the project to aspects
of the school curriculum: the history
of disease, scientific progress in understanding and treating infections,
the social importance of
vaccination and of ethical research, the mathematical methods of data
collection and of presentation
of numerical information. Schools will also gain:
- the opportunity to work with a research team at the University
of Cambridge
- experience of what is involved in a relatively
large-scale scientific research project
- an understanding of research
design and evaluation
- an understanding of how mathematical models
can be used to understand, predict and
perhaps control an epidemic
- an opportunity to use skills learnt in
maths and science lessons in a practical project
- an understanding
of how infectious diseases spread and the importance of immunisation
- an
understanding of ethical issues associated with collecting and using
data
- close interaction through project work between secondary and
primary schools and a higher
education institute
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