Milan Hlade, Osnovna šola Koroška Bela, Jesenice
Pupils often try to teach their peers or younger schoolmates. It happens that they are even more successful with this work than their teachers. At the same time they play teachers role. At Koroska Bela Primary School some pupils of the 8th grade visited the Multimedia lessons. They developed few applications which allow addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in the range to 10, 20 and 100 for the pupils of the first triade. We have also developed calculation with whole numbers application for their schoolmates. In this application we used a virtual girl , the mascote of our school. We named it – Blanka – after our village Koroska Bela. Pupils can choose the number of accounts to calculate. The application randomly choose values of necessary numbers for calculation. Blanka is counting correct and wrong answers and calculating achieved points. She also regularly measures the time. With our first applications pupils have helped their younger brothers and sisters at home. Our next step was connection with teachers of the first triade. Senior pupils presented addition and subtraction to their younger colleagues in computer room. With this project we achieved diversity of the math school lesson, connection between different generations and more important the lesson was completely prepared by pupils themselves. Pupils liked math in ICT environment. With our second application pupils have helped their schoolmates having problems with counting whole numbers. The application was used during remedial teaching. Pupils are writing their calculations in the notebook. The application verifies their results. Developing similar applications enable pupils to strenghten their knowledge and learning first programming steps. Students have to know certain school topics very well, they have to show some knowledge about programming, the application should be interesting and attractive. We are planning to develope similar applications using Scratch programe not only at math lessons but also at other school subjects. There are a lot of options in this field.
