E-Submission
A new STAR for 2010
Last year Ann and I had the opportunity to
rethink the See, Plan, Do, Check model that is closely based on the work of
George Polya (see Polya, G. How to Solve It 1957). We never really liked
the use to the word See, which doesn't really convey the first step of problem
solving where you really have to sort out in your own mind what the problem is
all about. And we had seen the excellent work of the Buranda SS teams, where
their experiences with philosophy, for which the school is rightly famous, led
them to reflect on what they had done, rather than try to find another way to
solve the problem. Our resulting thoughts are encapsulated in what we have
called the STAR model - which is summarized by the phrase
Be a STAR problem solver
We have included links to:
If possible, we would be delighted to receive
solutions that follow the steps of the STAR model and welcome any feedback that
you might have on the usefulness of breaking the problem solving process into
those four steps.How
To Access the Applets
When you click on a diagram that has a
hyperlink to an applet, your computer should launch your browser and
the applet will start if your computer is Java-enabled. Initially, you
may see that the applet has been blocked as this is a standard way in
which your browser will try to block programs that could be virus
plants. However, Java is completely safe in that respect, as the Java
language does not allow a programmer to write anything to the computer
on which an applet
is running. So you can quite safely "Allow Blocked Content"
and the applet should soon start to run.
If the applet still doesn’t work, you may well
have to download the Java software from:
http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp
You will need to locate and download the version
appropriate for your computer. This can be quite a big download (around
16 Mb) and will be lengthy if using a dial-up modem. However, most
classroom computers are Java-enabled as so much of the good stuff on the
web uses applets.
How to Work with
Applets
The purpose of the applets is to give the teams a
‘microworld’ in which they can experiment, have ideas, and search
for solutions to the problems posed. As the team is working with the
applet, you should expect to see them trying different cases and
refining their thinking as they look for solutions.
Once they have found a solution,
they will need to use <Alt><Print Screen> to capture a
screen dump that they can paste into their solution document, using the
Edit: Paste command. When the screen dump has been pasted into the
document, the team may need to:
-
Right click the diagram and set
the Text Wrapping to In line with Text.
-
Use the Crop tool to cut
off any unwanted parts of the screen dump.
-
Select the picture and use Edit:
Cut to cut the diagram and then use Paste Special: Picture
(JPEG) to reduce the file size.
The last step is particularly important if a
number of screen dumps have been collected as it reduces the file size
by at least a factor of 10, if not more.
Document Identification
When saving the document, it really helps us if the
solutions to all questions are compiled into a single document
and that the the filename and header makes it clear where the solutions came
from and which team sent them.
File Name:
The file name should make it
clear the level, school name and team name. Thus if the Tigers from Tarata
State School are in the Junior competition, they should use the file
name Junior Tarata Tigers.docx
for their solutions.
Header:
To ensure that each page is readily
identifiable, give the document a Header that includes the
Team Name, School and a Page Number.
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