I am having difficulty understanding the instructions for the Lesson 2: Building a Network Activity.
What are the guidelines vs the challenges on these slides? Honestly, this feels very confusing – or is my brain just fried? There must be a clearer way to write this.
I think the reason they did it this way is that the last challenge uses the three guidelines used in the first three challenges. I’m sure there is a better way to write this which may be less confusing.
My students did this activity and did not have trouble following the instructions. So, it may go okay with your students!
It’s probably way too late to help you with this, but I just did this today and I had the same confusion that you did. It helped to see the guidelines as restrictions and the challenges as goals. So, the restriction is that string is a expensive, and the goal is to use as few strings as possible. It’s an engineering type exercise – see what happens when you priortize each of the three considerations, and then see what happens when you are tasked to take them all into account at once.
We just did this one. It is probably a better exercise in person. You can hand out strings and then walk around with a pair of scissors to test their designs for fault tolerance.
In person you could even extend the concept with monopoly money and have them pay for string segments to get that cost concept.
One of our groups created a network with an extra node by just joining all the line segments together. So we did see some confusion. But that is a general problem with any metaphor you might come up with and try to implement in digital form.
Thank you both for your replies. I managed to get through the assignment, but it is helpful to know I am not the only one confused! 