Any ideas for interesting spreadsheets for pupils

[coolerking]

Hi,
After many years of teaching maths, I have started teaching IT for pupils aged between 12-15. The school has been lacking direction in this department so the pupils are lacking good skills. I have started teaching them Excel and they absolutely love it. I have been trying to give them interesting examples and have found many ideas on the web and created some myself. I hoping that someone could give me some ideas or point me in the direction of good books or resourses.

An example of a recent task was to create a crossword that has conditional formatting so it will indicate either if the letters entered are correct or incorrect and using comments for to display questions. Then I have thought about a wordsearch where they enter the words they want and then use randbetween and char functions to create random letters elswhere.

Using a mixture of 2007 and 2010 (don't ask!) in the same room but this will soon be just 2010. I hope to use Access in a couple of months but it's been quite a few years since I used it.


Many thanks for any input,
Cooler

 

[obiron]

how about Mastermind:

The computer picks four colours at random from a selection of 8.

you have 10 attempts to find the sequence.

After each attempt the computer tells you how many colours were right but in the wrong place (but not which ones) and how many were right and in the right place.

It teaches not only the programming side, but playing the game also required logic processing to determine patterns


Or Isolation:

On a grid of 8x8 or 10x10

Each player chooses a start position.
Each player then gets to move to an adjacent square and then knock out a square from the board.
The object of the game is to isolate your opponent to a single square before he does the same to you.

In excel it would teach about relative cell references and checking cell properties for their background colour.