DMC & 1000 Years of Knowledge and the Travels of Ibn Battuta
Panteha Radmehr
1000 years of Knowledge at Ibn Battuta Mall
Did you know that long before the Wright brothers, in 9th century Cordoba, Abbas Bin Firnas designed and tested the first flying machine? Or that Islamic astronomers designed a very sophisticated instrument, the armillary sphere, to plot and measure the position of any observed heavenly body and could pre-determine the exact time of sunrise and sunset for any day of the year? Perhaps you have heard of Al Jazari’s extraordinary timepiece, the elephant clock? And who could imagine that a lone and intrepid explorer, Ibn Battuta, would bequeath us perhaps the original Lonely Planet by writing his travel journal “Rihla” in the 14th century?
All those questions and more were answered during the recent trip of the Level 2 Foundations students from Dubai Men’s College, when they visited Ibn Battuta mall to find out more from the mall’s permanent exhibitions on 1000 years of Knowledge and The Travels of Ibn Battuta. The trip had a combined English and Maths focus with the group’s teachers constructing a collaborative task to be undertaken during the visit. Students, armed with iPads and tape measures, were required to interact with the displays, locate and record information, take pictures, estimate and measure, identify polygons and calculate various values. All of this took place in the visually stunning setting of the mall with Islamic architectural motifs all around providing the Maths teachers with ever more opportunities to bring maths to life! The English teachers weren’t disappointed either as the trip dove-tailed extremely well with the Famous People project the students are doing at the moment, providing rich material for discussion during and after the excursion.
Bringing Maths to life
This was a successful educational trip which was guided by the Learning by Doing approach to teaching in HCT. Beyond the wealth of information the students came away with, they had the opportunity to apply prior learning in English and Maths to a real-life situation. Obaid from N2F2 said: “This trip was good because we learned about Islamic history. We learned about important Islamic scientists and we had a good time with teachers and friends.” Another student, Abdulla Ahmed from N2F1 stated: “I really enjoyed the trip to Ibn Battuta mall because I learned information about Ibn Battuta. I also practiced English reading and scanning to find information and learned math in real life.”
By everyone’s admission, we were all exhausted traipsing up and down the different courts of the mall to complete the task but then, remembering that famous explorer, who for around 30 years travelled the world, quietly and without further protest, climbed on our air-conditioned buses to return to DMC!
Penelope Doyle
