Jan 26 2014

Games again…

Nrich – Estimating Angles

I have I have been very happily distracted playing mathematical games today! It all started when I wanted to find a good resource for estimating angles which Year 7 will be studying this week. My favourite is this from Nrich. I like the incentive of scoring more points for greater accuracy and the fact that like all Nrich games there is an option to display full screen which is excellent for the interactive whiteboard.

This in turn reminded me that I wanted to do a little housekeeping on my Maths Games blog – which is basically just a collection of favourites – many from Nrich.

Find the Factors – Iva Sallay

This is still a work in progress but I have removed outdated links and reorganised pages. I have added a Geometry page for example to remind me about the angle estimation interactive from Nrich.

I discovered Iva Sallay’s rather nice Find the Factors puzzles not long ago so added a post on that and also included it on the Puzzles Page. Note the other favourites there – I do like the Set Game which is still published every day in The New York Times.

C1 Revision Resource – TES

A games format always makes a change for revision. Have a look at this rather nice resource on TES for C1 revision (C1 is the first module on the UK A Level qualification – age 16-18). This uses Mark E Damon’s template which could easily be adapted for other topics.

There are some games templates available from the links below for those of you who may wish to create your own resources.

PowerPoint Games – from encw.edu/Edgames.

Game Templates (note that these are free for non-commercial use – see About).

Jan 19 2014

Problems and Activities

If you are searching for problems and activities for your Mathematics lesson or perhaps for homework where do you start? The Problems and Activities page (one of the I’m Looking For…. series) aims to help by providing some great places to look. I have recently updated the page and checked all links are working.

Teachit Maths KS3 Percentages code breaker

An important addition is the Teachit Maths site which though a subscription site offers its entire collection of activities as pdfs free. I have found many high quality resources here for all ages. Look at this activity on quadratic functions for example – this should really help understanding.

One of the suggestions for activities is to give students a diagram and ask them what the question is! This post has been updated with the addition of some great MEI resources, GCSE starters and from Bernard Matthews – the use of pictures in A Level trigonometry.

Hopefully – plenty of suggestions to keep your students busy – and learning!

Jan 12 2014

Questions- lots of questions

Both students and parents often ask where they can find more questions to practise. I thought I would compile a list of my favourites in one place so have put the list in this post on Mathematics for Students. I have referred to all these before but thought it would be useful to have them in place

Note that a great new feature on Craig Barton’s and Simon Woodhead’s diagnosticquestions.com (see these posts for further information on this outstanding site) is the facility to generate a pdf worksheet of any quiz you create. The worksheet includes space for students to write their explanations of why they chose the answer, and why the other answers are wrong. Diagnostic Questions example worksheet

Jan 4 2014

Resolutions for Mathematics Teachers

Jan 1 2014

Happy 2014

Happy 2014 (using geoGreeting) (Click on the image).

A revised and updated New Year resolutions for Mathematics teachers will be published on Saturday Jan 4th. In the meantime, check some number properties for 2014 and think about playing the 2014 Year Game with your students.

From Tanya Khovanova’s Number Gossip we see that 2014 has the above properties; the various properties discussed here could make an interesting series of starters; even though number bases are not on any specification I think they are well worth investigating – why stick to base 10?! Checking WolframAlpha for properties of 2014 (and a reminder that you can precede any WolframAlpha query with handwritten for a less formal font and diagrams) we can see various properties including the binary form confirming the fact that 2014 is odious.

Your students might like the Math Forum Year Game. How many numbers from 1 to 100 can you generate using the digits of 2014? Unlike Countdown which uses only the four operations and brackets, additional operations are allowed – but see the detailed rules.

As is traditional for bloggers at this time of year – these are the Top 20 Posts of 2013.

The wonderful people at WordPress sent me an annual report for this blog, I quote:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 120,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

So thank you so much for reading and wishing everyone a very happy 2014.

2013 wp