Cars and Karting - Forces and Friction

This is our cross curricular topic for Year 6 this term, we are using Mario kart and a piece of software called Race to Learn. This will be available soom through the Lgfl for all London schools.

We used Mario Kart for our persuasive writing week and the children created a new advertising scheme for Mario kart on the Wii both paper based and radio based. Via Twitter @primarypete_ has made an excellent presentation on how he used Mario kart in his classroom:

"Wii Love Learning" Mario Kart from Peter Richardson on Vimeo.

This is a great little video and we are going to be using some of his ideas soon.

As well as these ideas, we are also using Mario kart each week to race! Each week we choose one track, one car and one driver and all the children race using the time trials - recording overall times. They then have to work out their average lap time. There is also a small competition with the fastest being awarded a certificate each week. We are also looking at track design and which cars are better -if any. As in a few weeks we will be using the race to learn software to design our own racing cars and circuits.

We have also linked it to our DT topic with the children making their own moveable vehicles - these will also be 'raced'. The children are really enjoying the topic so far and more examples of their work and what we are doing can be found here: http://hallyd.edublogs.org/