Torbury Festival
![[decoration]](thumbs/torbury_thumb.jpg "[Picture] Torbury Festival")
Torbury Festival
As megastars converge on the quiet village of Torbury, disaster strikes for the worlds biggest festival. Can you save the day, or will thousands of hopeful fans be left stuck in the mud?
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Overview
Torbury Festival is a set of interactive lessons built around the staging of a music festival. To overcome various challenges, from floods to escaped cattle to over-excited crowds storming the stage, pupils must apply their mathematical knowledge to real life situations. The problems are intended to promote discussion, reasoning and creativity in order to ensure that the festival is a success!Mathematical content
The mathematics in Torbury Festival is suitable for pupils who are confident with the content of National Curriculum levels 6 and 7, i.e. pupils of above average attainment in Year 8, and average or above average pupils in Year 9 and in Key Stage 4.
Some of the lessons are opportunities for pupils to focus on process skills as they select, apply and use mathematical techniques that they have previously been taught. Other lessons (e.g. lesson 2) could be an opportunity to introduce new techniques and harder work in an enjoyable 'non-text-book' scenario from which the mathematics arises naturally.
To benefit fully from the lessons, pupils will need to calculate with decimals and percentages, including finding areas of circles and volumes of prisms and cylinders. They will also need to construct triangles and bisectors of line segments and angles, and apply the idea of locus. For some problems they will need to be able to solve equations and draw graphs of functions, using ICT as appropriate.
Organisation and pedagogy
Torbury Festival
involves four 50-60 minute lessons of classroom activity, each with optional homework.A mixture of whole class and small group work is involved. The application is easy to operate and is designed for use in a normal maths classroom. It requires an interactive whiteboard or whiteboard, a laptop (to be used by the teacher to load and navigate around the resource), a data projector and speakers.
In keeping with the ethos of the Bowland approach, the teacher's role is to set pupils realistic targets, challenge pupils to think and reason for themselves and manage discussions and plenary reporting sessions. Techniques should only be demonstrated as a last resort. Throughout, the goal is to develop pupils' ability to work and think independently.
Resources provided
This Case Study is presented as a browser-based application containing a collection of printable and ICT resources, including:
- Introduction - for teachers - read this first, as it contains more details than this overview.
- Teachers' notes - with lesson plans for each of the four lessons.
- Videos, audio clips and slides - which tell the story and present the problems.
- Pupil resource sheets - to print and hand out.
Resource requirements
(including hardware & software)
- The teacher will need a computer with data projector (or interactive whiteboard), sound output and speakers. The software is suitable for a Windows PC or an Apple Mac.
The software can be run directly from the Bowland Maths website, or you can download the case study and copy it to the computer(s) you will be using during the lesson, or to the school network.
The software requires a modern web browser with Adobe Flash Player installed. Windows users will also need Adobe Reader to view and print resources. These are both available for free download from http://www.adobe.com/downloads/.
- Pupils will need calculators, graph paper, graphics calculators (optional), rulers, compasses, stiff card and squared paper.
- Each pupil, or pair of pupils, will need a printed copy of the resource sheets.