Ribbit

Design Brief

Design Brief


Problem to be solved: Make a frog jump.
Materials: 1 paper frog, 1 strip of cardboard, 1 rubber band, 1 piece of tape 6cm long.


Mary and I used a Design Brief form to come up with ideas to make our frog jump. First we thought we should twist the rubber band and somehow use the stored energy, but we couldn't work out how to do that. We then thought about some sort of slingshot where you flicked the rubber band, but that didn't work either. 

Our leaping frog design

Finally we thought of making a hole in the cardboard and poking the rubber band through. I originally put a pen in as an anchor, but as that wasn't part of the materials I cut a small piece of cardboard off. At this point we realised we could sit the frog on the little "shelf" we'd made, and when we pulled and released the rubber band, he was flicked off the cardboard. We also realised he would travel further if he was heavier, so we cut another small piece off the cardboard strip and stuck him on. We tested it and the frog jumped about 2 feet.


I didn't see some of the rest of the class designs but when we demonstrated ours, the frog jumped over onto the other side of the desks - maybe 4 feet. It wasn't a competition to see how far he could go, but I think ours would have won!!

Distance our frog jumped

This was a really engaging task that most people in the class enjoyed. Some pairs didn't get their frog to jump, but most had a reasonable go at it. The hard thing was knowing what to write on the design brief, I should have asked for more guidance afterwards so that I can model it properly for the students when I do it. 


Greg said that he did some sort of project like this at least once a week with his students, linking to the current unit. I love this idea, as it will get them doing hands-on activities, thinking about properties of materials, and writing their process. It could be a good springboard into other literacy and numeracy activities as well, eg: 

• Write about the day from the frog's perspective, why did he want to jump? How did he feel about your efforts?
• Average the distance your frog jumped over 3 tries. Graph the class results, find averages, means and medians.

Quia Games

We signed up for 30-day trial accounts with Quia Web, which, despite the unfortunate pronunciation of its name, is a surprisingly useful Web 2.0 tool.
You can create a class by signing up your students with free student memberships, and then tracking their progress. It allows you to create a class page with a message for the students, sign up each name and have the usernames/passwords emailed either to you or to each individual student, or both. One nice feature is the use of the child's name as the username with a number attached, and a word with a number for the password - "glad51" is a far better password for a child than sT0#xXn@.

Challenge Board Game

Once you have your class, you can create activities for them. These range from all sorts of quizzes (true/false, multiple choice, ordering, unscramble etc) to games like Rags to Riches (much like Millionaire), Challenge Board (a bit like Jeopardy) and the ever-popular Hangman. Note - if you don't like the hanging, you can use other variations. One I really liked was Scavenger Hunt, which asks students to go to particular websites to answer the questions.

Quiz questions

The assessments are nice and they are fun activities, but they act more as a summative assessment in many cases because even if the student repeats the quiz, they really only have to memorise the right answers in most cases.


Where the real learning starts to happen is when you have your students sign up as instructors, and create the games themselves. Getting them to do it this way means that the learning is almost hidden - they're not just learning for the sake of it, they're learning so they can test all their classmates! Even in the 20 minutes we had to create a quiz, everyone quickly learned how to use the controls, so it's not hard to use.

This Week's Lecture - Safety Online
The focus this week was safety online, both for students and teachers. Greg pointed out that security for teachers is important. Personally, I have my Facebook site locked down so tight that you can't even find me in Google. Most people don't realise it's even possible to lock down information from specific people (including people who are on your friends list), but it is. The other important thing is that I value my role as a teacher, so I'm not out getting smashed all the time with people taking photos and posting them on Facebook. I think a lot of people don't consider their public profile and then blame the technology when they get caught. You wouldn't stick photos of yourself drunk on the local bus stop; why would you put it on your Facebook profile?


The other side of the coin is more obvious, and pertains to the security of the students themselves. We need to teach them explicitly how to behave responsibly and safely online, and this means respecting others as well as protecting themselves. Greg's answer to this was to have students use "safe" search engines only, rather than Google, but I'm not sure that this is the answer. Certainly in lower primary, Internet use is best designed by the teacher and actively supervised. But a student in grade 5/6 is certainly using Google at home and at friends' places, and probably the local library, so it's up to us to instill good values and ethics when it comes to the use of search engines. Of course Google will give results that are useless or inappropriate, but that's where teaching smarter searching is useful. The worst thing we could do for these children is let them reach high school without having learned how to do their own Google filtering.


Parents will be a great ally in teaching children how to behave online, and I think that the more communication with the parents, the better. This sort of thing needs to be addressed at the beginning of the year, and preferably face-to-face. Let's face it, many adults don't know how to use Google correctly, so why not involve the whole family, send out some search engine activities for them to do at home? The more correct exposure to technology, the better, and ultimately it's probably at home that the students will have the most access to the internet, so having the family involved could be the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.


The Department of Education has clear processes to follow when confronted with a case of cyber (or other) bullying. You can download the Student Supervision document, and cyber bullying is in section 4.6.2.4.7.2. It is interesting to note that this is in the section for "child abuse and neglect", and not "bullying". To me that shows that even the Government still sees "cyber-bullying" as a strange and incomprehensible beast. Really the only difference is that cyber-bullying is non-confrontational and can be anonymous (or at least the bully hasn't realised he's left a digital footprint). This, however, really is no different from writing "Sarah is fat" on the toilet door or the bus stop, or slipping a nasty threatening note into someone's bag or locker. The sooner adults stop sensationalising what is just a modern form of bullying, the sooner we can get to the roots of the problem and explicitly teach children the behaviour we want them to display.


There are a growing number of resources to combat Cyber Bullying. Unfortunately I think this has become a buzzword, and the word "cyber" conjures up either "cool" (Gen X), or "scary" (older adults), depending on the age of who you're talking to. I remember at school when we learned about drug education and the teachers kept using words that felt like they just didn't get us - I suspect it's the same thing with upper primary school children and the Internet - "cyber" probably means "daggy" to them. We have to be careful not to talk down, and to really address these issues appropriately. Otherwise it just becomes an exercise in "how not to get caught".