Bearings game: UPDATE

My bearings game now has three levels and instructions on its own site. Clicky

I also thought I'd show you what the race bit of the game looks like:

Lesson Sketch: Area and Volume of Similar Shapes in pictures

Not quite a full blown WCYDWT, but maybe slightly better than textbook examples. There are a few interesting questions here: Which squash bottle is not similar to the other two (one on the left)? What do they mean when they say that guitar is "half-sized" (volume is half)? How is cooking time of the turkeys worked out (scale factor squared or surface area)? More info about the maths of that last one here: http://mathnathan.com/2010/09/24/math-chef/

Lesson Sketch: Scale

Inspired by this I took a couple pictures, such as a picture of me with their textbook to work out my height, for pupils to iterate this idea of scale. What I really wanted was to find a picture of a claw scratch on a door, but I think that what I did find is even better.

An online news article was talking about a big cat that was spotted in the rural village of Thrupp. It was sighted many times but there was no evidence of it till someone took this picture:

Its a great picture for scale and we had plenty of animated class discussion speculating on the size of the cat. What was great about this is that we could confirm the actual size as the cat was later caught on camera:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/gloucestershire/hi/people_and_places/nature/newsid_8491000/8491497.stm