How a lesson runs

Sort them, make your case, justify it

The group opens the link and sees the cards scattered across a surface. They push them around, group them, discard and start again. The task deliberately does not say how many groups there are in the end – that is for the learners to decide and to defend.

How the cards are built

One set of cards, several tasks

Each topic has a single set of cards from which different tasks can be posed: group them freely, find groups of three, decide always–sometimes–never. Some cards are there on purpose to target a common misconception – they give the discussion something to work on.

Afterwards

What was laid out stays laid out

Paper cards are collected at the end of the lesson, and with them the work disappears. A digital arrangement can be saved as an image, compared between groups and taken up again in the next lesson. That is exactly what the whole class discussion grows out of.

Still in progress

Building your own sets of cards

Two things are being built right now. First, teachers should be able to put together the selection of cards they need – as a sorting surface for the browser or as a printing template for the table. And second, an assistant that helps in designing card sets for further topics: not an arbitrary task generator, but one that knows the design principles from the classroom trials and asks about them.