This idea came from OCR
Get three volunteers from the class. They will sit at the front relatively far apart from
each other. One of them will be blindfolded and will be ‘See no evil’, the other will have
headphones on listening to music (at a reasonable volume but not enough to damage their
hearing!) and be ‘Hear no evil’ and the other will not be allowed to speak and be ‘Speak no evil’.
You each give them one piece of information from one square on Activity Sheet 4. You also inform
‘Speak no evil’ of what variable they need to find out. You give them a time limit of 5 minutes to
communicate with each other all the pieces of information and they have to have a correct answer.
This is a fun, end of topic activity that can be very entertaining to watch. The key is to use the
whiteboards. The student who cannot see can speak and hear and similarly for the other students
and their other senses. Students have to figure out a strategy to communicate their ideas to each
other effectively. Remember they can write messages on their whiteboards which is crucial for the
student who cannot hear or speak! You may want to do an example first. Students not involved
should have access to the information you have given them and be encouraged to calculate the
answer themselves. In fact you could make the rest of the class the judge of whether the particular
group has succeeded in their task.
Thoughts
- students have to work as a team
- all students in team have to be involved for it to work
- what are other students in the class doing?
- does this have more impact than practising questions normally in groups?
Possible Adaptations
Although this might take a little while to explain the first time, it could be used again with other topics in small groups, where each of the roles (including teacher giving information) is taken by a set of 4 students, so all students are involved.
