North School Maths - How Many Of Your Jumps Does It Take to Beat Normal Powell?

Using an interesting prompt

During the last PMSS workshop, something that resonated with me was the value of starting a lesson with showing something interesting. Doug used a video of a sprinter and prompted with ‘how many steps did he take?’. They set up a a rope with cones marking out the distance and spoke about the strides a horse takes as it gallops towards the finish line. As I reflected on why I personally enjoyed the activities, it was clear that by showing something amazing and worthy of investigating, I wasn’t thinking ‘mathematics’ but rather, I want to answer some of my own wonderings. Mathematics just made it easier for me to make sense of it.

Below is an interesting prompt inspired by Doug and Charles that we created and trialled in the lead up to the House Athletics day next week.

LAUNCH

We showed a YOUTUBE clip of Mike Powell breaking the world record for long jump (we actually had a clip of Carl Lewis jumping first and had it disallowed because of wind assistance)

Discussion

Students were given some masking tape. From the starting line they had to estimate how far they thought 8.95 metres would be and justify their method.

EXPLORE

Some interesting methods were discussed before we measured using a tape measure.

10 of my feet = 1 metre and I do this to 8.95 m

If the length from one arm to my other arm is 1 metre, I just need to twirl around to measure.

Each of these carpet tiles equals 1 metre squared, I just need to count 9

Someone knew their height and lay on the ground and compensated

We had large lunge steps, we had small lunge steps

Random guesses in between everyone else for safety.

It was interesting to hear the conversations and then relate it back to the Mike Powell scenario. Do you think someone could actually jump that far? Prompting more discussion and changes.

Students began long jumping, measuring and recording. Extremely fun and very visual.

‘How did he jump that far, it’s impossible!’

Exploring the prompt

How many of your jumps would it take to beat Mike Powell?

Student examples:

I used repeated addition and added each jump together and then saw how close I was to the world record. But this doesn’t give the exact answer.

I used repeated addition, multiplication and division.

Reflection

Sometimes the best ‘teachable moments’ come from listening to what the students are saying as they explore the challenge. During this lesson it became clear that they needed to make and explore the concept of 8.95 metres by estimating, making and trying to jump that far. It wasn’t until they had tried, that they were truly impressed by the world record. My initial intention was that they would use division to work out how many of their jumps it would take to beat the record, but the skill of estimating became a more useful skill. Eg. If the record is around 9 metres and my jump is 2 metres, I need at least 5 jumps to beat him. This didn’t become obvious though until they were working it out.

Curriculum areas

Problem solving using addition, subtraction, division and multiplication
Converting between formal units of measurement
Understanding and using decimal numbers

Giving the students the freedom to explore length by running, jumping, laying on the ground stretched out or even spinning around was crucial to a deeper understanding of the big ideas of estimation and comparing. The students enjoyed gathering the data and were engaged in the second part of the lesson; providing evidence of how many jumps it would take to beat Mike Powell.

Student feedback

‘Fun!’

‘It was good because you could move around doing maths, we weren’t just looking at a whiteboard’

‘It helped me because I could see it visually and it helped me understand more’

‘You weren’t stuck in your seat, you could jump around and test things out’

‘We were doing P.E maths!’