Us teachers like a new idea or two but we often tend to shy away from them, we do not always have the time to put into place new strategies and keep them going. Recently, however, the Computing and Business Faculty within the school in which I work was challenged to something called Poundland Pedagogy. If you have not heard of this before it is where random items are bought from a pound shop (for legal reasons I need to make it clear that there is more than one pound shop in which you can purchase goods in; ok I don’t need to but it makes me sound more professional) and then teachers need to find interesting ways to use them in their lessons. After the challenge was initiated a magical box of random tat appeared in our office and it was our job to turn things we would usually ignore into new and exciting learning situations.

As I drew some gliders, a set of ping pong balls and some wooden cubes with letters on out of the box a feeling of dread washed over my body. I immediately had an idea for the cubes, then I realised these were pound shop cubes so there were only thirteen of them with letters on either side. This scuppered my plans for anagram work. After some thought I came up with some ideas, these I tried on a bottom set Year 8 class and a mixed ability Year 10 class. Amazingly students really enjoyed the lessons and were glad to do something different, one student even said, “we should do stuff like this every lesson, it’s really fun.” So here is some information on how I used these mundane objects…

• Gliders – I was confused at how these would work, maybe I could put questions on

  

  them and glide them across the room, but then they were pound shop gliders so probably didn’t work. It was actually in the middle of a lesson where I changed a plan on the fly (pun most definitely intended!) that I used these to good effect. I was teaching bottom set Year 8 about programming, this contains concepts they find hard to understand. I wanted them to get to grips with the idea that computers follow sets of instructions and if we make a mistake then that affects the outcome. They were not quite getting it when I remembered the gliders, I grabbed them from my cupboard and told the students to try and build them then write a set of instructions on how to make the one they had. They traded these instructions and the, now taken apart, glider with another student. The students then needed to build the glider based on the instructions they were given from their peers, some went wrong so worked out what needed to be done and changed the instructions they were given. Effectively they were debugging code as well as understanding how computers work at a basic level. It worked really well and I plan to use this activity with all groups, differentiating by the complexity of what they will be building.

• Ping pong balls – Star, ring and bus networks may be slightly defunct now but are a crucial part of understanding how networks work and thinking about which topology to use. We like to give a one off lesson on this to Year 8 so they get some idea on how networking has developed. It was another challenging concept for bottom set Year 8 so I decided to take them outside and make human networks. Each student was a device and each ping pong ball a piece of data. The ping pong balls were different colours so I gave each ball out randomly and stated that one colour needed to go to one student and another to a different student. To limit bandwidth I stated that only one piece of data (or ping pong ball) could be transferred (or passed) at a time. I then set conditions such as; in a bus network all data can only move in one direction, in a ring they can only pass to the people next to them and in a star all data needs to go into the centre (or hub) first. Students then acted out these events. After each one we talked about the speed and ease of transfer. Student quickly picked up that star networks were the most effective.
• Wooden lettered cubes – After the disappointment of there only being thirteen

  

  wooden cubes I managed to work out some anagrams for a lesson on backing up and archiving data. Whilst students were working I had an area where the anagrams were set up, I picked students at random to go and work out the anagram. They absolutely loved this as it gave them a break from a writing task and got them thinking in a different way. One student that is not very focused kept checking if I had put a new anagram together and wanted to go up and solve all of them. Before this task I had also got them to select a block at random from a bag and pick one of the two letters, they have a scenario for an exam they will be taking in May and in pairs needed to list down any keys terms starting with the letter they had drawn out that might be in the exam. This was an effective started and moved us quickly onto discussions about meanings of key terms and what would appear in the exam.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and gained some inspiration, you may not have picked up an idea for a resources but if you now feel confident enough to raid your local pound shop then I have done my job well. I myself am off to order some more lettered cubes (hopefully with twenty six in each pack) and random things the students can build.