Why can the smartest kids often come up with the most annoying, disruptive, and irritating ideas?

I can’t remember who said it, but someone famous did comment once that being bored breeds ideas and innovation, and it is good for children to have some down time and boredom in order for them to have the opportunity to be creative and imaginative without framework or limitation. The only problem with this is that if you develop an equation that combines intellect with boredom, adds peer influence, and subtracts constraints, that equals sheer nightmare for a teacher! There are a whole range of ideas and inventions that students have dreamed up under these circumstances, and the pea-shooter is one that reoccurs often.

Teachable went to see the World Pea Shooting Championships last week, held ever year at Witcham, Cambridgeshire. The rules are simple, and the equipment even more so: use straw, pea and a puff to hit the target.

Now, we know that Pea-Shooting is perhaps not a teacher’s favourite sport, but why not use our ideas and inspiration to twist an old student favourite into something the whole class, including you the teacher, can enjoy! The safety precautions are fairly obvious: have a clear target area, and perhaps control the supply of peas so that only one at a time are fired. But a basic pea-shooter can be made with a cheap plastic straws and dried peas, although a range of sized straws and peas will help the experiment. There are some obvious science-related questions to explore:

1. Do smaller peas travel further, or is it about how well the pea fits in the straw?
2. Would a shorter straw help the speed and accuracy?
3. Can the class design a different way to launch peas at the target (but not necessarily test it…)?

And finally, some more off-the-wall ideas to entertain in the last week of term:

Living Without Technology – Research and discuss technological inventions and their impact on our lives. Give up a particular technology for one to two days and keep a journal about the experience (mobile phones or a computer / internet would be a good one to choose). The discussion afterwards can be directed either towards how much impact the science behind these everyday technology has on our lives, or how people in the mid 20th century would have lived without them. (Ages: 7-14, Subjects: Science, Citizenship, History).
Science and Disablity – Investigate technological innovations that help people with disabilities to communicate, and list design features you would want to include in a personal digital assistant (Ages: 11-16, Subjects: Health & Fitness, Science & Tech, Topics: Chronic Conditions. Communications & Computing. Design & Invention)
Programming a Pizza – Design the sequence of steps needed to make a pizza, create an algorithm of the steps and simulate programming a robotic device to “create” a pizza (Ages: 11-16, Subjects: ICT, DT).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Science, Summer of Sport, Teaching Ideas, UK teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.