 This video is about using grid algebra in the Mathematics classroom. In the opening window, choose the interactive grid algebra. Press the Run button, and you immediately get a grid that is empty to start with. One of the things that you need to do with a class really before you do other things with grid algebra is to get them familiar with the grid. And so this video is about what you might do with a class to help them get familiar with the structure of the grid. To start, I recommend that you change the grid a little bit. If you go to the Menu button on the Tools bar, choose New Grid. Choose 24 columns, say No to allow negatives, and choose 1 to 24 times table, and click on OK. And accept that. The grid will look the same. The only difference will be that there are now slider bars that appear. On the Tools bar, click the button that says 1234. Numbers will now appear in the grid. And one of the first things I tend to do with a class is to ask them to tell me what they see. And this will range, of course, what their responses are. It will vary. But usually somebody comments on the fact that there are times tables. So in the two times table, we've got 246, 810. They may also notice it coming down 246, 810, and so on. I usually then ask them, once they've commented on a number of things that they've noticed, ask them, OK, this is going 369, 1215. What would be the next number to the right? And get them to predict that. I then get hold of the scroller bar, scroll bar, and move it one to the right. And they will check to see whether they're right. And likewise, we might do it with another row, and decide in row five here, what might be the next number over there, and then stroll and make that movement. Similarly, we could ask about coming down. So we're coming down, say, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, what might be the number below. And then get hold of the other scroll bar and scroll down and see whether that's right. That's one of the first activities I do, and you can decide how far along you go. You might scroll quite some distance and then ask the same question. So what might be the next number to the right of 52, and so on. And you might scroll down to higher times tables that are there. Following that, I sometimes then load a file that I prepared earlier. And if you go to File and Load Grid, which you can either get from the File menu at the top, or from the toolbar, you can go to Menu, File, and Load Grid. And there are grids that at any time when you've got a grid, you can save that grid and you can load it up later. So I've got a grid that I had saved earlier, and I'm going to load now. It's called Missing Numbers. I decide to call it. And this looks very similar to the grid that we just started with, but if I was to scroll along a little bit, you see that there are some numbers that are missing. And also, down the bottom, there's a little box here with numbers in that box. And that comes from pressing the button 1.2 in the menu. If I press it again, that box will disappear. If I press it once more, it will come back again. And the idea here, then, is to think about perhaps what number should be in this missing cell here. And if they decide it's 16, they go along, find the number 16, click, drag it, and then let go. And then it will stay there. If anyone puts in an incorrect number, so if I try and click on 16 and drag it to this cell here where it's not right and let go, then a rubbish bin appears. And if you click anywhere on the screen, the 16 will drift into the rubbish bin. And so I usually get people up at a time to come and put a number into one of the missing cells. Just to say how I get the missing cell, then the toolbar, there's a rubber icon. And if I click on that, then actually I go to any cell and just click, and it will rub the number out in the cell. And then when I finish rubbing, go and click on that button again to stop doing any more rubbing out. So we can scroll to different places within the grid, depending upon how high you want the numbers to be. And then that exercise can be continued where they can try and get a number and place it in. The bottom number box only goes up to 200. If you actually are going to have some numbers larger than 200, so if we go perhaps here, and we've got a number we want to put in into this cell. And so looking at that, it's the 18 times table, so I want 18 more than 306, so I want about 324. There's an expression calculator that I can click on. Go to the cell I want, click on that cell, and now I can enter something that I want to go into that cell. And I think I said 324, and then click enter, and then that will go into the cell. So that's one activity here, looking at missing numbers. I have another file that sometimes I use that's similar, but what I've done in fact is to rub out most of the numbers, and I only left a few in. So given this number here, I then sometimes click on a highlighting color and highlight a cell and ask someone to come up and put in the number that they think should be in that cell. Again, I need the number box, so I'm going over to 1.2 to get the number box there, and then it will be about getting the number dragging into that cell. And then sometimes once one pupil's done that, I then get them to choose a color and choose somewhere else and see whether somebody else can come up and enter the number into here, and then someone then will enter their number there, and then choose another color, or the same color, and go and choose another cell. And obviously some will be harder than others. It depends how mean they want to be to each other. So that's an activity which is getting the more and more familiar with the grid, and I find it very helpful to be asking the question of how did you work out that number so that they're beginning to articulate some of the structure to win the grid, how they worked out what might be here given the information that they've got already. Then there are two other things that I'm going to suggest here about getting to familiar with the grid. If we exit here and go to the original main window and click on Resources, if I click on the topic of multiplication tables and go to Handouts and choose the handout that says which number goes here, and it can either be one row, two rows or four rows or six rows, depending upon how challenging you want it to be. I'm going to choose four rows and click on Open. Then there's a sheet here that you could print out and give to a class where the idea is that they're given one number in one of the cells and they have to write down what numbers would be in the highlighted cells. So sometimes there's an opportunity to do some work on paper away from the focus of the software that's based on the work they've already done on the software. If I go back to Main Menu, another thing I sometimes use is one of the tasks here. These are computer generated tasks. If I click on the drop-down arrow there, they're done listed in alphabetical order. If I go down to Place the Numbers, there's a single player or two-player game. I'm going to choose a single player, select that, and you get a box here deciding what level you want to start with. I'm going to start straight away at level one, click on OK. Here there's always a box with instructions that appears, and I'm going to click on OK, and that then reduces the size of that. Here we've got a grid with just one row here. The target number is four, and I have to decide which cell the number four should go in. And if I think it's this one, I just click on it and the number four will appear. If I'm correct, the next target is five. I click where that should go, and so on. And when I finish, I can either go for the same level again or click on the next level. And again, I click where I think the numbers ought to be. If I've actually clicked in the wrong place, so if I think the number seven should go here, when I click, actually the number seven will appear in a cell where it should be. But it will be blue to indicate that the computer did that rather than the person doing the clicking. And so the levels continue. If at one time I want to jump a few levels, I can go to File and Restart Task, and that gets me this little box where I can go and choose the level. So perhaps I might go up to say level 15 and see what that's like. And so that's going to end up being a bit more challenging. So I think number 13 is there. And then I have to think about where does the number 30 go in this grid, given 12 is there. So that's an activity sometimes that children can do individually or in pairs in a computer room, or it can be done within a class with interactive whiteboard as well. And that's where I'm going to finish here about thinking about activities that you can do that help children get to know the structure of the grid.