Gairdin: Gnomes with the Youngest Students

We can confirm that gnomes are fascinating for everyone — from first-graders to CEOs, and everyone in between. Among the gnomes, the most popular so far is Štefan, who really stands out with his impressive black beard. We'll let you in on a secret: he works as a miner. As for the other gnomes and their professions, we explored that last week, together with first, second, and third-graders at Prežihov Voranc Bistrica Primary School.

Since we had never worked with such young students before, we were a bit nervous before stepping into the classroom. Will we run the workshop in a way they could understand? Will they be able to solve the tasks successfully? And most importantly: will they have fun?

It turned out our worries were completely unnecessary.

In an impressive display of teamwork, all students successfully sorted the gnomes and discovered rules for determining professions. They quickly noticed that a good starting point is to ask whether a gnome has a shovel. If it does, we then ask whether it also has a lamp, and so on. To keep the energy high, we added a bit of PE-style motivation — whenever someone guessed incorrectly, we did a few squats! This encouraged students to think about the best sequence of questions and helped us build a classification tree.

We then moved on to a more creative challenge. Students came up with their own rules for what houses of different professions should look like (for example, both gardeners and tailors have round windows, but only gardeners (obviously) have a garden). Each student then choose one gnome and drew its house. This is where their creativity truly came to life — we saw mushroom-shaped houses, flat and steep roofs, gardens, swings, fences, windows of all shapes and sizes, and discovered that (almost) everyone draws a chimney on the right side of the house.

We then introduced a bit of friendly competition, which encouraged even the shyest students to join in. They exchanged drawings of houses and checked whether their classmates had drawn them correctly. They understood the instructions and the essence of the task really well, so thankfully, no squats were needed in this part. :)

At the end, we presented the same challenge to a computer. We provided it with data about the drawn houses, and explored whether it could figure out the rules. The computer successfully built the tree, and the entire classroom let out a surprised, synchronized “Waaaaaw!”

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A detailed description of this activity, along with many others, can be found on the Gairdin website.