Lesson aim

My aim for this lesson is to get the students to construct an algorithm for identifying a propaganda poster.

Thinking aims

For the students:

• To identify which of the "catagories" they identified when sorting, are values and which are parameters.
• To have the students identify which values belong to the parameters that they have, and which of these paramters are useful for identifying propaganda posters and should be taken further into their algorithms.

Lesson

The lesson is a two hour lesson that in reality lasts 1hr and 45 minutes due to lunch. I started by getting them to cut out all the "catagories"they had from the last lesson. They were then to group the ones that belonged together, such as names of colours together, items of clothing together etc. They were then to think of a parameter for each of their little groups of values. I initially asked one person from each group to write their parameters on the whiteboard, but this didn`t work well from a logistical point of view. Next they had to look at their groups of parameters with the values, and try to see a pattern in the values belonging to each parameter i.e. limited use of colour, bold writing, large figures. The final stage was to then create an algorithm that could be used to identify a propaganda poster. To do this they had to select which of the parameters they felt were important.

Reflection on lesson and aims

Not all groups managed to finish their algorithms and I felt that too much time was wasted cutting out the never-ending lists of catagories. Also it was helpful to have an overview on the board of the parameters that each group had identified, but in practice they whole group would go up and just stand watching (and criticising) as one person wrote.  So I would be a lot more specific in future about how I wanted this done. I also feel that the class was not as motivated this week, and they were not as keen to do the activities as they had been to do the initial sorting .

I still feel that there is a gap between identifying the parameters and values, and transforming them into useful steps in the algorithm. My initial feelings are that the parameters are not specific enough to be useful. In order to make the algorithms useful tools I did remind the students of some of the things that shoudl be there, like composition for example, but they had to go back to theiir paramaters and values in order to decide WHAT it was about composition that should be there.