And I've seen a hamster thinking.

We had a class hamster in a set of cages made up of Rotostak, plastic fish tanks covered with chicken wire, plastic tubes and bottles. He kept his food hoard in a plastic house partly buried in straw, at the end of the run. To get there from the Rotastak he had to go along a tube, across the inside of a plastic 2 litre bottle, through another tube and down into the first tank, up another tube and along and down into the tank with his hoard.

We fed him at many points around the assembly to make life interesting. One day we had put a carrot in the Rotastak. He found it and seized it in his mouth like a pirate cutlass, then aimed for the exit tube. After two attempts he realised this was not going to work. He went down the tube into the bottle, turned back and took the carrot by the end and pulled it after him, and then started to push it ahead. Then he stopped. He then ran along the route to his hoard and back. After that, he chewed the carrot in half so that it would go round the turns on the way, and successfully took the two parts to store. It took about 20 minutes, and we stopped the maths lesson to watch him.

Everyone in the room, including the hamster, showed much more sustained concentration than was usual in that room.

Penny