Lesson 1 and 2 - Information Processing

STARTER

As an introduction to Information Processing, set up a quick practical task that can easily be completed in the classroom. Pupils to get into groups of 3 to act out a simple striking and fielding scenario; groups to nominate 1 batter, 1 bowler and 1 fielder.

Bowler is to screw up a scrap piece of paper and bowl the ‘ball’ (paper) to the batter (who uses his arm/palms of hand as a bat). As pupils are taking part in this practical task stop them at an appropriate time and talk about how information processing can be applied to the situation and each particular member of the ‘team’. For example

• What information from the environment around
  him/her is the batter taking in?
• What decisions do they have to make
• What brings them to make that decision?
• What is the output / end product?

Apply these questions to each of the 3 participants.

MAIN ACTIVITY

Presentation: Information Processing

Pupils to take notes as teacher moves through each slide using sporting situations to reinforce key concepts. Teachers to adopt Powerpoint depending on the level of the pupils. For example, some teachers prefer to provide pupils with handouts with the majority of the notes supplied [sometimes with missing gaps to be filled in], while others prefer pupils to take down all the notes themselves.

PLENARY & EXTENSION [HOMEWORK]

A plenary can be completed using the learning objectives introduced at the start of the lesson. As a starting point, a focus should be on all pupils identifying the simple 3-stage model of information processing [particularly with Whitting’s model] as input, decision making and output.

At the end of the presentation, there are questions that will test the pupils’ knowledge of the topic - these can be set as homework or extension questions.