Who goes where?

Trying to get the best possible living arrangements in a home is an activity that many students will relate to. The solution will always require certain criteria to be met. One strategy is to write the names of all the people in the household on small pieces of paper. These pieces can be moved around on the plan of the house until an arrangement that satisfies all the requirements is found. Start with whatever is non-negotiable, then work with the flexible elements. In this case, the fixed elements are that:

• Nana is downstairs
• Mum and Dad have one of the two largest bedrooms
• either the boys or the girls share and are in the other large bedroom.

It soon becomes clear that no solution can have the TV room downstairs, and it would be good if the students could articulate the reason for this. It is as follows: bedroom 1 is one of the two largest bedrooms and will therefore be occupied by either Mum and Dad or two children sharing; this means that if the TV were in either of the other downstairs rooms, it would be next to Nana, which is unacceptable.

If Mum and Dad are upstairs and the girls are sharing bedroom 1, the TV room could be either bedroom 4 or bedroom 5. If Mum and Dad are upstairs and the girls are not sharing, Reita needs to be in bedroom 4 next to them, so the TV room must be bedroom 5. Some students may like to try listing all the possible solutions.

Question 2 asks students to draw a plan of their own house. They could start this at home in order to get the layout reasonably accurate. You will need to specify whether you expect a scale plan. If this is so, make sure that your students know how to go about this, that they have the necessary equipment, and that they know how much detail is expected. The task does not require a scale plan; a tidy sketch showing the rooms and how they relate to each other will do. Once the plan is drawn, the next step is to rearrange things to accommodate an extra person. Remember that some students live in homes with rooms to spare, so no rearrangement may be needed, while others may live in overcrowded situations. Some sensitivity could be required to ensure that those from overcrowded situations don’t feel unnecessarily exposed.

Introduce the students to other logic-type activities that require rearrangements according to set criteria. There are a number of good books containing “co-operative bit problems”, where each member of the group has a clue card and the group has to pool the clues to solve the problem.

These include:

• Erickson, Tim et al. (1989). Get It Together: Math Problems for Groups, Grades 4–12. Berkley: Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California.
• Goodwin, Jan M. (1992). Group Solutions and Group Solutions, Too! Berkley: Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California.

Links

This activity could form part of a unit on living here.

Create a plan of an imaginary 5-bedroom home for your students. Get them to make a list of the family members in their own or an imagined household. They then write down the ages, physical and emotional needs, interests, and responsibilities of each. Finally, they decide who goes where in the imaginary house, explaining their reasons and the compromises they have had to make.

Suggested achievement objective

Social studies

•  How and why people exercise their rights and meet their responsibilities (social organisation, level 4).

1.

a.–b. Solutions include:

Room	Solution 1	Solution 2	Solution 3	Solution 4
TV	Mika	Nana	Nana	Nana
Bed 1	Mum & Dad	Mum & Dad	Mika & Siaosi	Eseta & Reita
Bed 2	Nana	Reita	Eseta	Mika
Bed 3	Eseta & Reita	Mika & Siaosi	Mum & Dad	Mum & Dad
Bed 4	Siaosi	Eseta	Reita	Siaosi
Bed 5	TV	TV	TV	TV

 

The two biggest rooms are shaded.

Other possible solutions need to be checked against all the requirements.

c. Answers will vary.

2. Practical activity.