Jul 13 2013

End of term activities

Darth Vader-like curve on WolframAlpha

The school year is coming to an end for teachers in the UK and looking at the statistics for recent popular posts I can see people have been searching for end of term activities. I have recently updated this post with suggestions for such activities. Recent additions include fun with some plots on WolframAlpha; there are in fact a whole family of Star Wars curves! See also many other fun curves!

Other additions to the original post include Bingo which works really well. You might like to try a team game? Try The Workers of Zen. (ATM publish books of team games) and I must mention A Little Problem for the Holidays!

PacMan by Alec Schultz on Desmos

If those WolframAlpha equations are a bit much for younger students they could try something simpler using the Desmos graphing calculator; look at Alec Schultz’s PacMan for example, you could just show your students how to restrict the domain for straight lines, maybe show them the equation of a circle and see what they can produce! For more Desmos art have a look at this wonderful collection! (I have added a post to Mathematics for Students to show how to display parts of lines and circles on Demos)

Wishing teachers everywhere a happy holiday (only WolframAlpha would give you the Scrabble score as well as the definition!). For teachers already on holiday I hope you are having a great one.

See also – The last few days of term.

Mar 29 2013

Happy Easter

Google graph – click on the image.

A reminder that you can just type a function into Google and its graph will be returned!

Darth Vader on WolframAlpha – click on the image

WolframAlpha of course can show you some graphs of Easter eggs!
I noticed whilst using WolframAlpha today random suggestions of queries popping up that somebody out there thought I might enjoy (very worrying how right they are!). This popped up – I had not realised that typing for example Darth Vader curve into WolframAlpha would give me just that!

It’s Easter time again, so time for an annual update – some Mathematical Easter treats!
See this fully updated page.

Jul 17 2011

Last Lessons ….

Update: end of term activities page.

In the UK schools are finishing for the summer, some have already completed school for the year.

What to do for those last lessons?

No videos – though I could make an exception for the counting chimps, a video I was introduced to by Alex Bellos at the SSAT conference which he included in his session and shows the astonishing recall of a chimp – compare the human!