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An FSMP Extension Resource

Last week I went for lunch with Ria Symonds (@RiaSymonds). Aside from being a close friend of mine she is also the Further Mathematics Support Programme’s (FMSP @furthermaths) co-ordinator for the East Midlands. Alongside lots of gossiping she also gave me a copy of this pack shown below:


There are some great resources in here and I will probably blog about a few others in time, but today I want to write about a group work resource entitled “Building Bridges”. In this activity each group is given a set of the following cards

 The idea is that the cards are dealt amongst the group so that each person has a set of cards. They are then each to choose a piece of information that they think important from their cards to share with the group. The groups task is to work out what the bridge looks like and then work out how much cable was used in total.

I’m looking forward to trying this with a class and seeing how long it takes them. I think there will be quite a few groups that get the image of the bridge wrong, and then computing the amount of cable is an additional challenge. As an extension, a group could then work out the minimum number of cards required to complete the problem. I think that as an activity to promote group work it will be good as there will be plenty of discussion between group members.

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