So far in Photo Sandwich the students have practiced their skills on combining layers. While I was gone at the MACUL Conference, they created an original image with at least two layers, and in some cases several more! All images were taken from Pics4Learning, a website that offers educators photos from the public domain. No attributions are necessary. Click on the thumbnail to see a separate post (where you can leave individual comments!), then in that post click that thumbnail to see a bigger version of their photos. Next, they add photos of their friends.
The second year students in Computer Salad 2 just finished up their spreadsheets for our Popcorn Comparison. We brought in three boxes of microwave popcorn from three different companies, filled out a data sheet with prices, number of packages per box and ounces in each bag. Then we popped one bag of each, measured the amount of popped corn in cups, and worked out how to calculate how much each brand cost per ounce of popped popcorn. Whew! It takes a lot of thinking, problem solving and patience to input all the data and the formulas, but then the spreadsheet does all the calculating for us. Once that was done, we had fun making our spreadsheets look awesome–and even included a graph of the results.
This is a favorite project with our kids over the years, and it isn’t just because they get to eat the data once we’re done collecting it! It’s real world math that stretches their minds and their math thinking while still teaching some rocking computer skills.
