Hack your classroom with Fidget Spinners - 13 ideas for your lessons

As an educator I am always looking for ideas and inspiration to bring all aspects of creativity, design and engagement into the classroom.

Here are 13 ideas I came up with to use Fidget Spinners in your classroom to engage and also understand physics, maths and from 3D design to the sine function...lets go:

Activity 1: Use the spinner as a timer, for an activity in class like a spelling test, or times tables or for quiet time. (ok this idea is quite lame, but keep reading)

Activity 2: Create a spinner yourself - design and make as fidget spinner yourself. Heck even make them for your friends and family. Use a Microsoft Form to find out what they want. Size, colour etc. You can make the fidget spinners with just 1 ball-bearing unit in the centre and Epoxy Resin to glue nuts on the edge. Easy peezy!

Activity 3: Get 6 spinners and time them - find the mean, median, mode and range. Share the data you have collected in shared Excel file and graph the results

Activity 4: Talking about friction and the ball bearings. What materials slide best? Where else would you find ball bearings? How do you make them go faster? Can you hack a fidget spinner to make it go faster. Record the times before and after the hack. Who most improved their performance?

Activity 5: Plot the rotation of the ball bearings on a curve (sine function)

Therefore graph of the sine function can be studied:

The ball bearing in the centre follows this pattern but how about the static ones on the outside during a rotation?

Activity 6: Create other types of fidget toys with Lego. What models go faster? Will materials make a difference? Can you add a motor how fast can it go?

Activity 7: Teach argument with fidget spinners. What makes a fad at school such as fidget spinners, pokemon cards etc? Arguments for them? Arguments against?

Activity 8: Make a Fidget Spinner in Minecraft... Use Minecraft: Education Edition and create NPC's and chalkboards. As an extension use redstone and try to make a working spinner or create a minecart within it. Discussion points around friction.

Activity 9: Circumference exercise, check out the lesson below and adapt for your classroom and removing variables.

Activity 10: Teaching probability with fidget spinners: Quite a clever idea and lots of ways this to make more complex by adding or removing colours.

Activity 11: If you had 1628 ball bearings how many fidget spinners could you make? Great maths problem try it your self then watch the video.

Activity 12: Create a Fidget Spinner in Windows Paint 3D. I got this template from Microsoft Remix3D.com (https://www.remix3d.com/details/G009SXQ6Z6Q3?section=0) then edited it in Paint 3D.

Activity 13: Symmetry. Talk about the types of symmetry in a fidget spinner. It is a good practical introduction to rotational symmetry

I found some inspiration in this article:

Would love to hear YOUR ideas in the comments below, there seem to be endless possibilites to move this discration to a great engagement tool where the only limit is your imagination.

Call to action:

• Comment on the blogpost below with an idea of your own
• Download Windows 10 and 3D Paint and make your own. Look at the other 3D tools inside Windows such as 3D builder and mixed reality viewer to prototype.