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Measuring: numeracy introduction


a slide from the presentation about measurements

This set of activities is designed to get people actually measuring and moving around the class. Along the way, they will confront skills such as recording data, making tables to show results, working with Imperial and metric units and comparing them.

Fun with 'yard sticks', steel tapes and a wonderfully cheap set of kitchen scales with the most non-linear spring I've seen for ages. I might do a screen cast with this one as well...

The scale plan sketch activity allowed for differentiation, groups were mixed up deliberately to introduce different students to each other in the early weeks of the Numeracy module. The presentation slides about measuring the Post It note raised issues of rounding, and of converstion between units.

Image of a yard stick and 30cm ruler showing effect of parallax

I was actually quite surprised how strong the parallax effect was when using my small digital camera in macro mode, zoomed out to a medium long focal length. The camera lens was directly over the 5cm/50mm scale mark in the image above, and the two rulers were accurately lined up.


Keith Burnett, Last update: Sun Sep 04 2011