Any good inquiry starts with a provocation, and this one had a lot of people talking. My office is across from the drone aviary and on Monday we noticed “a mess”, but we also noticed it was not a total mess. There was something organized about it. This struck a few of us as interesting and sparked conversations about where it had come and why it was there. Exactly what a good provocation does.

We later discovered that it was designed for a grade 3 math lesson where students needed to measure and set the perimeter and area for a “quarantined safe space”. Learning about measurement can be done in so many ways, but our teachers designed a lesson to grab the students’ attention with the wonders of a mystery, then applied relevance and meaning to the math concept under study. What an amazing way to activate student learning. 

This morning I found myself in the AI Lab (Centre of Excellence) with a class of excited KG2 students who were exploring maps and measurement. What began with a mapping expedition to the AI space, turned into an integrated measurement lesson of “less than and more than” with our robot Pepper leading the way with unifix cubes. Students then utilized their measurement knowledge and jumped into a coding activity with Ozobots and Cubettos.