Launches the Furbles Demo in the browser. (no fullscreen yet - I am working on this!)
"Furbles are the shape of things to come: this software is technology at its best and well worth the money."
John Dabell, TES Magazine.
About
Furbles started life as an idea for teaching statistics in an interesting way with children from KS1 to KS3. The original version was published in 2003 online, and its popularity spread. It has been downloaded and used over 20,000 times in the last five years. In 2006 Sherston Software commissioned me to write a commercial version. This was published in January 2007. Despite receiving extremely good reviews, the commercial version failed to catch on. The original continued to be used in schools, but the purchase of the new title was modest.
Furbles was originally devised as an innovative way of imagining statistics and the depiction of statistics. As a trainee teacher there seemed to be a clear difference between students' ability to interpret graphs and their ability to generate graphs. My interpretation of this difference was that students were learning to create graphs algorithmically, but were not taking time to consider what the graphs actually represented; they did not see how a graph expressed an internal relationship within the data. The idea of Furbles was to bring the graphs and the data that they represented together in a very fundamental way.
Part of the idea of Furbles was also to encourage teachers to take a fresh look at how to teach the subjects. Rather than offering a large amount of content to place students in front of and a mechanism for recording their performance (though it had some of that too), Furbles offered the teacher a platform for their imagination to find new questions and problems within a framework which had charm and fun.
This model of a Furble (right) from Ferndown Middle School is a wonderful example of some work that lead from Furbles at a primary school. If you have other examples of work based on Furbles, I'd love to see them and share them here, so please contact me.
If you are interested in purchasing the 2007 commercial version, then please visit the Sherston Software website.
The original version and the demo version of the full explore mode continue to be available for free on this website.
Flash
Primitives was developed in Flash and is available by clicking on the Flash icon above or to the left. You will need to have Flash 9 Player installed. Visiting the page should trigger an installation if required.
Please note that Flash has security restrictions in place which mean that you cannot use the keyboard in full-screen mode. As the idea develops I will consider publishing a downloadable version which removes these issues.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 UK: Scotland License.