Alien Invasion

Alien Invasion is a set of four interactive lessons about a full-scale alien attack that coincides with a class visit to Manford City. To set the scene and support the lessons, live television news bulletins, radio broadcasts and telephone messages help to develop the story line. The invasion leads to a series of non-routine problems for students to solve as the narrative unfolds. The problems are on the theme of mathematical communication and are intended to promote discussion, reasoning and creativity. In lesson one, students use and interpret maps and scale drawings and recognise simple properties of parallelograms and circles in order to follow the clues to locate where the aliens have landed. In lesson two, students calculate with decimals, use mode, mean or median and solve problems involving direct proportion to decide where everyone should meet up. Lesson three requires students to construct and interpret data in simple line graphs such as distance-time graphs to give the army information about the aliens. Lesson four requires students to find the n[sup]th[/sup] term of a sequence and formulate and solve linear equations in order to rescue the teacher captured by the aliens. To use this resource: • download the zip file • extract all of the files • run the start file