Monthly Archives: June 2014

Jun 28 2014

End of term activities

With the end of term (UK) rapidly approaching I thought I would check and update the End of term activities page. All links have been checked and updated where necessary and some additions made, including:

  • Learn the syntax for WolframAlpha, perhaps a chance for students to explore WolframAlpha, using the various slideshows, note the questions on the worksheet
  • Explore the Desmos Graphing Calculator
  • the addition of a Desmos page illustrating how to draw line segments and/or parts of circles – get your students creating pictures

    Art Elements

    Get creative on Desmos

  • the addition of a Desmos Spirograph page and an excellent Autograph activity by Owen Elton to a post with more information on Spirograph
    Spirograph

    Spirograph on Desmos

    Spirograph - Autograph Activity

    Spirograph – Autograph Activity by Owen Elton

  • Try or write your own Sporkle Mathematics quiz

    Sporkle: Find the missing primes in two minutes

    Sporkle: Find the missing primes in two minutesA

And to finish – perhaps a song or two!

Jun 22 2014

Lesson Endings

Thinking about lesson endings, which perhaps we don’t always give enough thought to I have updated this page on Mathematics Starters and Plenaries.

An interest of mine is in creating presentations and inspired by Nancy Duarte and her Slidedocs thought I’d experiment with designing some new slides. I took the Endings page and turned it into the following slideshow.

Note that links within a presentation do not work when uploaded to Slideshare, if you would like a version where you can navigate from or return to the Contents page then download this PowerPoint version: Endings – Mathematics lessons or as a pdf: Endings – Mathematics lessons

 

Jun 8 2014

Experiments at School

Experiments at School - Online Experiments

Experiments at School – Online Experiments

I have mentioned Experiments at School before, an outstanding resource from The CensusAtSchool Project run by the Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education. I used this successfully with Year 8 (UK age 12-13) last year; this year I want to do some work with Year 10 (age 14-15. which means of course we will be able to compare Year 8 and Year 10 data!).

Choose any of the online experiments which are items 14 to 21. Selecting any experiment takes you to an introduction giving full details of the experiment as well as teachers’ notes and pupil worksheets. UK schools can get their LEA and school codes and actually try the experiments which will generate data for the school, however anyone can use the Database Interrogation Tool and choose a random sample of data from the database.

Database Tool - Experiments at School

Database Tool – Experiments at School

The best way to become familiar with the tool is to launch the tool, select the logo as in the image above then the follow these very clear instructions from task 1 on page 2. This will take you step by step through how to use the tool including selecting a random sample of your choice from the database. (Note the the info buttons as shown on the right of the above image do not currently seem to work, however you can get full details and all the resources for each experiment as described above on the Experiments at School page).

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My Year 10 students successfully tried all the experiments (with the exception of 16: Candle Combustion, I thought candles in the IT room might not be a very bright idea!). As they were doing the experiments there were some great conversations going on which will lead into interrogating the data very well. For example all the students tried the angle estimation and I heard discussions for example on the type of angles which are easier to estimate and that the flat diagrams are easier to work with. Note that even if your students cannot access the online experiment they could use the worksheet provided as an introduction to the activity or an online angle estimation activity such as this from Nrich.

This site is very comprehensive in that there are many suggestions for activities. For example we can use our own data and data from the database to answer questions such as those suggested in the teacher notes. Interestingly many of these questions came up in discussions between the students: ‘Do you improve with practise?’ ‘Is it easier to estimate smaller angles?’ ‘Is it easier to estimate the angle from a flat or a 3D diagram?’

There was much amusement and discussion generated by the All About Me activity. This worksheet fully explains the genetic traits used in the data and I suspect they will enjoy seeing if they can find out if they have a double somewhere in the world!

This will also be an opportunity for students to use Excel as I will provide them with a spreadsheet of the class data with data filters added so it is easy to sort by any column. They could also create charts, scatter diagrams for example, using Excel.

excel

All resources mentioned here are from TheCensusAtSchool Project run by the Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education. See this page for information on Copyright and Permissions.