I really enjoyed attending a London Maths session yesterday morning – led by Dietmar Kücheman, we had several very enthusiastic Maths teachers working on his lovely Geometric Sparks tasks.

I created the illustration here with Autograph (web version) and was reminded how much I like the features of Autograph web including that lovely colour palette for styling objects! I created a very simple Autograph web file which allows you to move point C along the line (y = -2x + 16), you can also move points B and D to create a rectangle, the Area will be shown for any rectangle. For a more sophisticated version, try this, created by Robert Smith (@RJS2212) (on his phone!)

You can see these tasks on Dietmar Küchemann’s blog Geometric Sparks, but note that Dietmar has now updated these tasks and they have been published by ATM, see Geometric Sparks – Generating links with shapes in space, book and slides, by Dietmar Küchemann.

As you can see from the Introduction to the tasks on his blog, Dietmar Küchemann has based the tasks on NCETM’s Secondary Mastery Professional Development Materials, Theme 6 is on Geometry.

See also, published by the DfE, new guidance -written by the NCETM’s Secondary Team to support the teaching of maths at Key Stage 3. This guidance offers a detailed ordering of the maths that students need to learn from the beginning of Year 7 until the end of Year 9. (See more on KS3 on my KS3 page).

You can look inside the Geometric Sparks publication to see the format for each task. Each task is clearly presented with a commentary and possible methods of solution, including the answer/s.

Perhaps an approach many students might use…

We looked at several tasks in the session, Week 3 Monday provides a lovely illustration of how useful it can be to add lines to a diagram. From Robert Smith, on Autograph again, see his Autograph file for this task.

I took Rob’s file and added some lines and displayed the angles….

It’s a small world sometimes – in October I included Enigma Maths hub in my post on solving linear equations, so I was delighted to meet Jayne Webster at the Geometry Sparks event. Do keep an eye on that site for future developments too.

We can check the Geometry resources on Enigma Maths hub.