Tuesday, January 2, 2001

Minutes of meeting re: Lincoln 4^th grade activities

Present: Victor Baez, Dave Haas, Janet Kim, Tom Moher

1. Reviewed status of Snookerpuss project

1. Do we know treatment groups/students? We can probably still retrieve this information from the kids. Let’s do it right away.

2. How to deal with question 1? We need to look through the responses and develop some kind of categorization scheme. I see at least two dimensions: (1) type of strategy, and (2) amount of detail/thought given to the response. As to types of strategies, some were based on the GPS, some on traversal patterns, some on marking, some on just “being careful.” (So there would seem to be at least four different categories.) Janet will do this question.

Regarding question (2), there are several issues, including the kids’ appropriate or inappropriate use of the grid (on both X and Y axes), the precision of their prediction, whether their prediction is really justified in terms of the picture they produced, etc. Dave will do this question.

3. Victor’s comments: When it came time to interpret the data, if you could plug in three or four more challenging questions for them, it would be good. It was probably a little too easy. Make them think in more spacial ways. Extend the activity. Modes of thinking. It was too easy. The kids remembered when Victor later introduced interpolation and extrapolation. Let the kids screw up more on the graphing instead of correcting immediately. Timing was about right. Needs more challenging questions. Overhead picture really helped. Scouting worked, prediction at the end.

2. Reviewed status of Bee project

1. We saw a demo of the application to give Victor an idea of where we’re headed. Didn’t have a great deal of time to discuss things; we will continue to meet with Victor planning the application and intervention after his Spring schedule is resolved.

3. Janet, Dave, and Tom will meet next Wednesday morning to discuss progress on evaluation of the Snookerpuss adventure.