Mathematical Miscellany #28

MEI – Calculator Crunch

This coming June MEI’ summer challenge, the Calculator Crunch will be helping Year 6s get ‘calculator-ready’ for secondary school, and additionally provide extra practice for Year 7s.

Note the dates – from 10 to 20 June, on each school day, MEIMaths will tweet a question a day for students to work on. PDFs of the questions will also be available from MEI’s page for display on whiteboards and to print as hand-outs. MEI has designed the problems not only to practise using a basic or scientific calculator but to develop mathematical thinking skills. Lesson plans will also be provided.

On the subject of MEI and Primary Maths, don’t forget their latest wonderful Sumaze! Primary app, one of a series of three apps in the series. All highly recommended, these problem-solving games cover a wide range of ages. Sumaze! which explores arithmetic, inequalities, the modulus function, logarithms, powers and primes is a problem-solving puzzle game suitable for A level mathematicians and above. Its sequel, Sumaze! 2, which explores fractions, decimals, percentages, primes and digits is suitable for those studying GCSE Mathematics and above.

For some more practise with calculators, perhaps try this calculator exercise from ADA Maths. Students can check that they can key in all the calculations correctly by answering the questions and checking their answers. ADA Maths is a free Mathematics Question Bank with no login required. The creator is Sam Powell, a mathematics teacher from the UK, working in Australia. All questions have answers, some have a fuller solution and a video explanation. Several categories of questions are available; look at Algebra for example and we see some nice use of colour in presenting a solution to a problem expanding double brackets (select Show Solutions) These examples could be helpful for students when revising.

In February of this year, I was very pleased to see that we can use Desmos for Statistics. Tom Bennison has written a large data set (AQA-Cars) resource using the Desmos statistics visualisation functions. It really is very easy to copy and paste into Desmos and display boxplots. Tom’s resource includes questions for students. It strikes me we should use the large data sets with younger year groups, using Desmos (or GeoGebra) makes it very easy to investigate such data when we are teaching boxplots and other Statistics topics.

Tom Bennison – Year 13 Exam Question a Day

Tom has been busy, see also his Year 13 Exam Question a Day with questions up to June 13th. Tom has used Sample Assessment Materials from the awarding bodies’ websites so students can find mark schemes using the reference for any question. This will be a very useful resource for revision now and also in future. I do like the way we can easily see the topic for each question.

TeachitMaths Proof review sheet

Following my post on Proof resources, looking further through TeachIt Maths proof resources, I see many gems. Rather good for year 11 Higher GCSE students is this Higher Level Proof review sheet.

In June we have for London teachers, Maths Week London. You can still register for this event, there are a limited number of welcome packs remaining.