Author Archives: KW
Using light to save lives: dancing traffic lights!
Here’s a great way to encourage people to take more notice of traffic lights: engineers in Lisbon have made them dance!
People can dance in front of a camera in a booth and the image gets transferred to the traffic light! Apparently more people are stopping at the lights and this is helping to make crossings safer. I just wonder if they are still concentrating on the road!!
Click on the image to find out more.
Portrait by Eagle5
One of our homework challenge choices was to create a portrait of someone special and explain why this person was important. Eagle5 has kindly agreed to share this fantastic portrait of her Dad. 
Fraction madness!
We’ve been trying out some practical fractions challenges where we had to work out the fractions of different shapes when we had limited information. We investigated the shapes to discover which ones fitted exactly inside other ones. Then we used this information to work out the fraction each of the shapes were as a fraction of the blue square (the largest shape). Only the orange, red and yellow triangles fitted exactly inside the blue square. The other shapes we had to work out by comparing them to the triangles. We eventually discovered that the other shapes were the following fractions of the blue square:
Green square = 1/2 Orange triangle = 1/4
Red triangle = red square = pink triangle = 1/8
Yellow triangle = 1/32
Then we set ourselves some more challenges. We had to make some patterns using the different shapes and then work out the fractions of the whole shape each colour represented. The pictures below show some of our challenges. e.g. On this one, there are 10 yellow triangles so we know that yellow is 10/32 = 5/16 of the square. But, the yellow covers some of the red, so we need to work out the red base and then subtract the yellow to find the fraction that is red in the final shape. Then we could finally work out the fraction that is blue… Not as easy as it sounds!
These were tricky for different reasons but some of them are especially tricky because the pattern makes us think we have one fraction for a colour whereas the calculations show something different…. We found out that we always needed to check that the fractions of all the parts added up to make one whole one…
Using the information above, we worked out the fractions of all the colours in this ‘rainbow’ square made by laying other shapes on top of each other on top of the blue square..
This was another tricky one: We needed to check the information we started with very carefully to solve this one…
This one was especially tricky as the layout suggests that there are only three colours in the shape, but we discovered that there were, in fact, four… We ended up finding the fraction of the (almost) hidden colour too…
Memories of Coventry Blitz by Mongoose29
It was a very calm night. I could see the full moon out of the window. The children were in bed and I was playing cards with my co-workers. Half the time, we were called out to cities like London because we had to make sure no-one got hurt when the Germans were bombing. All of a sudden, the deafening sound of the air raid siren echoed around the city…
My friends rushed to their houses to put on their uniforms and I dashed upstairs. As quickly as possible, I put on my navy warden uniform and went to wake the children up. When they were safely in the shelter, I directed lots of people to there too. Then I saw a small German plane lit up in the spotlight…
The planes were dropping things but not bombs; they were dropping flares. They were lighting the city up. We all were crowded together in the small shelter. I felt like a mole under the ground with humans stomping above us and all you could smell was death and smoke. We all just sat there hoping the next bomb you heard didn’t come through the roof; luckily, none did. The whole entire city was in flames so the next wave of German bombers could see exactly where to go. The worst part about it was we were standing in water — some of it from people’s tears but most of it from the burst copper pipes. It was so hard to see; the only light was coming from my small lamp. Lots of people were bumping into each other and falling into the thick layer of water.
Happy to be alive, we all left the shelter. The first sounds I heard were crying and gasping: the whole city was falling apart. Dust covered everything and there was no colour; the water was flowing down the roads and the ancient cathedral was destroyed. Even the parts that still stood were boiling hot…
Memories of Moonlight Sonata by Marmoset29
The cold winter’s evening of the 14th November 1940 is one one would never forget. It was a full moon that night and, for a change, the sky was clear — there was no mist for miles around. If it hadn’t been for the bombing, it would have been a perfect night.
When our clock read 18:00, we could make out the gentle hum of the diesel-powered planes coming from the east. In reality, it was actually 19:00 but we had never got round to putting our clock forward and it looked like we never would. Anyway, I was in my fire-warden uniform, ready for any flares. Well, I was physically ready but inside I felt as timid as a new-born rabbit.
Minutes later, I was out there, on the streets I knew and loved. As a child, I had drawn, with chalk, all over them and once I had even scratched lopsided pictures into the pavement, some of which were still visible. Near tears, I reached for a hose — I would do everything in my power to prevent my home from obliterating into pieces…