Lesson aim - to develop their ability to see and describe

Thinking aim - to introduce the challenge and start building stairs

Lesson outline

At the start of this lesson, I told the students we were going to draw some pictures from a description given as if it were described over the telephone. The class was divided into groups of three and took it in turns to describe and draw. I had selected three different sets of images for each group, but each image belonged to the same theme, one had landscapes, one had people on horseback, and one had animals. This was to make it easier to test their algorithms later. The students really enjoyed this task and found it very difficult not to ask questions of the person describing. Once they were finished and had, had a chance to compare their drawings with the original images, I asked each group to create a descriptive algorithm for working with paintings. They were to think about what the describer had said that was helpful , and what they needed to know that hadn`t been said.

For this task, the paintings selected were not surrealist paintings, as I wanted them to work from a variety of different art styles in order to try and find all the parameters and features that need to be identified in order to make a good description.

Reflection

This was a very successful lesson. The students loved it, and we had to repeat it over a couple of weeks to ensure that everyone got their turn at describing. The students understood from doing this the importance of really looking at what is there, and how when we glance at something we miss out many important features that mean that the drawings don`t make sense. It was very hard for them not to ask questions, and sometimes they would comment on things that were happening in different parts  of the room. I realize that as an extension to this we could have played the yes/no game with the images. Getting one student to pick one, and the others in their group to try and guess which one it was by asking questions that could only be answered by yes or no.

The algorithms were not bad, but I could see were missing some information, or were a little to simplistic.