This year, all of the students in our Learning 4Life Success program are taking on a huge challenge. We already started!Our First Annual Cube Challenge is already helping us learn a lot!
First, we have set a goal. Our goal is that, by the end of this school year, every single one of our Learning 4Life Success students will have solved a Rubik's Cube.
Don't worry. There are only 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (that's rounded to about 43 quintillion) different combinations!! (How's THAT for a place-value math challenge??!!) We just need to figure out the combination that makes all six faces on the cube a solid color.
This week, we each received a cube to use for the year. We spent time this week working the cube (they call it "cubing") and several of us actually solved a side!
 |
| Would ya look at that!! I solved the White Face!! |
 |
| Cubing requires research. |
 |
| More research! |
- research (We already started this! It's fun!)
- following written directions accurately
- following oral directions accurately
- understanding, following and memorizing algorithms
- perseverance ("sticking to a hard task")
- the power of a "we can do this" attitude
- making a hypothesis and finding a strategy
- problem-solving
- teamwork (we are all are in this together, and we will reach our goal only if we help each other)
- patience (a lot!)
- taking a deep breath after we mess something up and then refocusing
- how to start and stop doing something when asked
- spatial reasoning (seeing and using patterns and sequences)
- practicing something until we get good at it
- tons of geometry and math words (cube, face, vertex, algorithm, rounding, quintillion...)
- doing something that feels/looks impossible but turns out to be possible (we sure hope!! HA HA)
So far, we get to work on our cubes after we have our other assignments done. We even have a tab on our class website for "Cube Challenge."
Cubing takes a lot of thinking. It is really, really fun!
