Equivalent fractions: what fraction of each day our rooms were lit, from micro:bit logs.

A week before this lesson, Year 4 chose three places to test, the classroom windowsill, the school hall and the book corner, and the teacher left a micro:bit in each, powered from a USB plug and running a MakeCode program that logs the light level every ten minutes, day and night and through the weekend. The teacher has loaded all the readings, about 3,000 of them, into a Google Sheet, with a summary tab that has one row for each day and 24 cells in each row, one per hour, shaded yellow where the light was on and grey where it was dark. In pairs, children count the lit hours for each place on each day, write them as a fraction of 24, and then mark the hours off in groups of two, three, four and six to find the same fraction with smaller numbers, such as 12/24 = 6/12 = 2/4 = 1/2 for the windowsill. They hunt for surprises, such as hall lights on for part of Saturday, check each one against the ten-minute readings behind it, and put a question of their own to the log, such as which place was lit for the largest fraction of the weekend. Each pair ends by explaining one fraction family to the class and what it says about that place.

Tools: micro:bit, MakeCode, Google Sheets Nine ideas for your own version in Generate