BlogDale

Last week saw the start of the CARS project at school, designed to raise the achievement and motivation of young mathematicians. Unable to resist, I’m hijacking part of it for my own ICT purposes - it just seems an ideal opportunity for the young leraners to develop their ICT skills in creating graphics to get their pictures on their teams, but most of all it gives them a chance to develop their writing skils on their team blogs (which we’re in the process of setting up). The intention is that we’ll do pre-race podcasts for each team, and we’ll also podcast the commentary from the races.

So what’s this challenge then? Well, using the CARS modelling program, participants set up a racing car according to their own measurements and estimations of the speeds it is capable of on a particular track. (The car parameters are taken from an actual Formula One car to add to the realism!). All sorts of other parameters are factored in such as weather, pitstops, tyre life and (my favourite) ) driver attitude. All this goes onto a spreadsheet model and the race is run - things get exciting as jostling for position goes on, engines overheat and the weather changes. Those drivers who made the right choices reap the rewards, and they climb the leaderboard in the race series.

Teams have already made themselves known at the CARS blog - watch this space (and that one) for exciting developments as they update their teamBlogs with their progress and successes.