A reminder of all the great resources on Jonathan Hall’s Mathsbot – there are so many activities which students can use whilst working at home; with answers provided for students to check, they are getting feedback as they work. A recent edition is the student version of Do Now. Students could try for example Differentiated Questions or a topic ladder of their choice.
Nrich is of course an outstanding source of resources. Yesterday morning I thoroughly enjoyed the web version of London Maths – thank you to Charlie Gilderdale for a great session. One of the resources we looked at was Cryptarithms, mathematical puzzles where the digits in a sum have been replaced by letters. This task has a carefully chosen collection of problems of increasing difficulty and it struck me as a good resource that students could work on from home – the problems could be printed off and then students can get away from the screen and work on paper.
For more on working at home, see Bring on the Maths and A Level Mathematics – Have you seen…?
Visit the museums from home!
From the Science Museum, Mathematics in our World which looks at how mathematics connects to so many aspects of our lives and see also this collection of mathematical objects. Seeing the Spirograph, a favourite childhood toy reminds me of the brilliant digital version, Inspirograph by Nathan Friend. Try altering the gears so that the fixed and rotating gear are the same size, or make one size a factor of the other, make the two sizes have a common factor, or not! Investigate. You can change the colours too and create a work of Art!
For some beautiful images try the 3DXM Virtual Math Museum. Have a look at all those plane curves for example and note that you can select individual curves and change parameters…see this pdf for further details.
Have a look at the Google Art Project which features Art museums from around the world. The project also has user-created galleries, which teachers can use to create themed presentations of artwork from different collections. Try a search on mathematics.