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26/04/18

This week we continued with the Mathemagician badge which we started two weeks ago. This week we played Airplanes from Clause 3.

We started the meeting with a game of Wink Murder while the leaders sorted out what we were going to do. It ended up being quite a noisy game, our girls like 'dying' in style!

Once they had finished that, we got some tables out and the girls sat round them, in their sixes. We told them that they would be making paper airplanes and that the best decorated one would win a prize. We gave them a piece of paper and a pencil, as well as $85 of the Brownie Bucks from the activity pack and told them they could start planning what they wanted it to look like while we made up a price list. We looked through the cupboard and pulled out various odds and ends which we wanted to use up and wrote out a price list which we gave to each six.

We then invited the girls up, one six at a time, to do their first big shop. A couple of girls got confused and thought that the piece of paper was for them to make into the plane, not to write on, so they had to go back and do some quick recalculations on what they could afford. Other girls were very meticulous and came up with a list of which colour pencils they wanted! The Leaders ran the shop and made sure the girls were doing any Maths required, such as "if you want 2 stickers, how much is that?" and "you've given me $10 and it cost $6, how much change do you need?". Some of the younger girls were especially proud of the fact that they had done it correctly! We also had one of our older girls who was just buying pipe cleaners for the hell of it, so we decided that prices were going up as stock was low. She came over asking for 3 more and we told her they were now $6 each. She ran off, came back with $20, and when asked how much change she needed said "none". We asked her if she was sure and she thought about it and then said yes. We then saw her talking to the Guide helper and then came back asking for her $2 back! We pointed out that you can't leave a shop and then come back and ask for your change so she want off with a face like thunder!

Time ran away with us a little bit tonight and we suddenly realised that we hadn't done a dry run of the promises we were doing tonight so we stopped the girls and got them in a circle to practice. This unit does quite a complex ceremony, involving the new girl and her sixer skipping round the circle, singing and the unit replying. They then also spin round in front of the mirror as the unit says "twist me and turn me and show me the elf, I looked in the water and there saw" and the new girl replies "myself". As the new girls have never seen this happen, we always have to do a quick practice beforehand.

Once we had done that, I organised the judging of the airplanes. I got each six to show me their plane and tell me a bit about it and then I lined them up and got them to throw them down the hall. We then had a winner for distance and a winner for best decorated. The girls were a bit put out that there weren't actually prizes though!

We had a few minutes spare so we played a quick game of Splat. I had to pull out my cross face at one point because one of our older girls refused to sit down when she was out because she hadn't been paying attention.

Finally, it was time for the promise ceremony. We enrolled 4 new girls, which surprisingly went quicker than expected. We handed out the Mathemagician badges to all the girls and then let them all go home.

This meeting was very good from a leaders point of view, we spent most of the meeting standing and chatting whilst handing out various crafty supplies. The girls also seemed to enjoy the chance to be able to roll play going shopping and choosing what to buy and being able to handle the money. I'm not sure many of the parents let them do that. In hindsight though, our prices were a bit low. We assumed that the girls would want to make more than one plane in their six, so we had set the prices low enough that they would be able to afford a few pieces of paper but they ended up making one per six and so none of them ran out of money at any point.

Mathemagician Badge | University

12/04/18

We decided we would do the Mathemagician Challenge Badge with our girls this term. It will take up two meetings, and this was our first. In this meeting, we decided we would do The 1001 Trick, and Magic Square from Clause 1, Map Colouring from Clause 2, and Groups from Clause 4.

We started with the 1001 trick. Each girl had been asked to bring a calculator with her and we had a few spares. We then sat them down around tables with leaders hovering nearby to help out. One leader called out the instructions and the girls followed them. They all seemed impressed by the trick, although it took two attempts for some girls to get the right answer. We didn't attempt to explain why it works, although we did show the girls that multiplying their 3 digit number by 1001 gave the same number repeated. We have quite a few yonger girls in the unit and I was the only leader who understood it so we decided that it would probably take half the evening to explain it to the girls.

We then did the magic square. Each girl was given one 5x5 grid and one 4x4 grid on a piece of paper. We then got them to work out their 8 numbers on the back before filling in the grid. This one took a lot more adult support, especially when it came to finding the 8 numbers initially. Once they had done this, they managed to fill out their 5x5 grids fairly quickly, although some of the younger ones struggled with some of the additions, despite having a calculator in front of them! They then filled out the 4x4 grid and swapped with someone nearby. One of the leaders then called out the instructions for circling and crossing out numbers in this grid. There was some confusion early on as to what numbers they should cross out. The leaders reading the instructions thought it said cross out any number in the row and the column that is equal to the circled one when in fact you had to cross out all the numbers in the same row and column. Once we had sorted that misunderstanding, the girls quite quickly found the four circled numbers and added them up. Almost all girls got the magic number, although I had to help one girl who didn't and we discovered that the initial square was wrong and that the Guide Helper had managed to say that 2+4=8. Once we sorted that, everything worked fine!

I then ran the map colouring. We had only printed the simpler shapes and we handed out a sheet to each girl and told them the instructions. I had a few girls clarify them to start with and then they all just got on with it quite happily. Most girls understood the task and completed it correctly. I think we should have also had the maps of Africa and South America so we could have said to the girls that it was possible to do in four colours or less and then challenged them to do it on the complex map.

Finally, we played a quick game of groups. It got quite hard to work out how many girls were playing as some of them wanted to finish their maps but occasionally played a round or two and then went back to colouring!

All in all, I think this evening went fairly smoothly. It was quite tiring being the most comfortable Mathematician in the room and having to answer all the girls questions, but also a great way to hopefully show girls that Maths can be fun. I'm looking forwards to doing the Clause 3 shopping game at our next meeting. So far, I would thoroughly recommend doing this badge, although having a leader or two who understand the Maths behind the tricks is a good idea.