Teachers’ notes: Measure Island – Ruler of the Island

Aims:

1. to show students how to use a ruler accurately
2. to provide practice measuring lengths in mm, cm and m
3. to teach this topic in a fun way!

The Activities:

The activities require Flash Player.

These activities were developed in response to frequent comments from teachers of other subjects – particularly technology, science and PE – that students could not measure lengths accurately. I have focused on using a ruler or tape measure using metric units. Eventually there will be six activities, not all are online yet.

1. The Flea Circus: Students practise using a virtual ruler to measure lengths in mm. They have to drag a ruler into position (but they don’t need to rotate it) and measure the length of a line. Accuracy of ±2mm is allowed (this is reasonable in the context and the same as in UK exams). There are 10 questions, the first five use a ruler marked in mm; the next five use a ruler marked in cm – but the answers must be in mm.

Not everything is online yet, this is a big project! More links will appear as I complete more sections.

Measure Island (including the source code) by Lois Lindemann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

There is a list of all the available files on the downloads page for this resource.