The humble spreadsheet can encourage students to talk about doing mathematics. Ideas and investigations you develop are futureproof. The ‘small laptops’ that are becoming more common allow more flexible use of class based pair and group work.

Useful book for when students ask ‘do you like mathematics?’

GCSE maths web site sees increase in hits.

Access students get a taste of what is coming next year in statistics

Ranking data simplifies the calculation

Food labelling – traffic lights or the full data?

Quick quiz for students to check their understanding of the words used in the book

48 quiet dice used to model half life

Where do you cut the map?

Naming the parts of the real number line and sneaking Venn diagrams back onto the syllabus…

Don Norman has it wrong for adult students

Microsoft foobar

10 questions in hot potatoes

Maths tables produced using MS Excel

Single sided worksheet on the three averages and probability

Calculator based exercises

More questions to keep the learning going

Quick worksheet on an abstract topic

Quiz sheet with answers

Scatter diagram with draggable data points demonstrates line of best fit issues

More Hot Potatoes quiz questions with feedback

Another 10 multiple choice quiz questions

Hot Potatoes quiz for decimal addition

Are there patterns to learning in Maths? Are these different in different subjects?

Slideshare deck shows step by step solutions.

Trig problems bring together a lot of skills

Some notes from a new blog

PowerPoint gets a sound track and is published to YouTube and TeacherTube. TeacherTube has problems with sound on MOVs made with iShowU version 1.33

Volume and area are not the same!

More questions about area and volume of easy shapes.

32 old chestnuts with answers on two sides of A4. Easter exercise.

YouTubes on rectangle, parallelogram and triangle, and on circles and composite shapes

A record of a negotiation; the start of a week of whiteboards

Multiplying out practice with feedback in hot potatoes

Chi-squared test viewed another way…

What do we need to teach people about computers?

A small note for the top of the whiteboard…

PEDMAS, BEDMAS and BODMAS

Equivalence is different to identity

Adding and multiplying requires a ‘rules switch’.

Blood stain measurement as a motivation for maths and error analysis.

Multiplying terms helps students to revise indices and directed numbers.

Slideshare.net lets you share slides. Imagine if you could record sound and time transitions…

Plot the curve and find the median and IQR

I guess this is a podcast with visuals.

YouTube video about tree diagrams in GCSE Probability. Me talking with illustrations provided by a PowerPoint presentation. I scripted the speech but then extemporised at various points – and managed this in two complete takes.

A maths quick quiz for the first 15 minutes of the lesson. I usually kick off the data handling module with the probability topic as it sits on its own and links back to fractions so nicely.

Script for an explanation of tree diagrams suitable for GCSE Intermediate maths; there is (nearly) always a tree diagram question for students on the data handling paper. I’ll add a problem sheet before recording the screencast.

9 minutes and 46 seconds on basic probability, including the probability scale, expected frequencies, mutually exclusive and independent events, possibility space diagrams and even a without replacement problem. All aimed at a GCSE Intermediate group. The .mov file was produced by ‘presenting’ a PowerPoint while speaking a commentary recorded using iShowU screen cam software. YouTube provide the hosting and convert the .mov to a Flash movie.

Wooden toy found at the Frankfurt Christmas Market that is in Birmingham UK at present.

The formula above has to be written as a single line with brackets to ensure that the top line is calculated before the division, and that the square root function applies to the result.

√(((5.51 – 6)x2 + (5.89 – 6)x2 + (6.51 – 6)x2)/3) =

We spent an hour working over examples with recent Casio calculators [...]

MS Excel has powerful data plotting functions but the default settings are for illustrative graphs for presentations rather than printed graphs of scientific data. This handout suggests some settings that might produce better quality graphs.

Half term break provides a gap long enough to forget some bits of Maths, and this worksheet is designed to jog memories.

By spending extra lesson time on fractions – front loading in the jargon – I can save time on percentages and ratios. This kind of teaching needs trust from students; as I teach adults, I’m upfront about what I am doing.

Very handy web site has flash animations of basic fractions processes complete with fla files for further customisation.

‘Spot the common factors’ approach works well for equivalent fractions puzzles. The kind of puzzle with unknowns on the bottom provokes thought!

More audio learning: five minutes on prime numbers and finding prime factors. Students need something to write on and with unless they have excellent short term memory!

If 5 kilos of potatoes cost £2.60, how much will 7 kilos cost? These are simple everyday problems but spending a little time on them lays the foundation for percentages and ratios nicely. This podcast works through some easy examples.

Numeracy blog for teachers from Scotland, and a Flash animation Scientific Calculator

Word file with fractions quiz. I use a 10 minute quiz at the start of each lesson to soak up later arrivals and to consolidate the work from the last session. The students get used to working under test conditions

The last one before I have to start using PDFs because of fractions

...boost the mark by 5 or 10 and that could mean a whole grade

Just 10 minutes at the start of each lesson

Quick quiz (on paper) at the start of each lesson…

Ambiguous descriptions of formulas in newspapers

Now I have the topics mapped, it is time to start adding bits of content

Draggable triangle with perpendicular height

Simple use of David Joyce’s Geometry Applet to animate diagrams

Time to start putting some content in soon

This timeline is all my own work and I didn’t look at the textbook… Lesson 2 and 3 applied to an animation showing how the area of a parallelogram is calculated…

Tinderbox from Eastgate systems allows rapid development of complex web sites and a visual map of ‘emergent structure’ of a teaching task

Use a guitar to explain rates of change of various variables

Feedback from the first paper

Use VBA for smooth dynamically updating scroll bars

Last minute favorites for the non-calculator Module 5 paper

When is a crime rate valid?

Why do some students find this problem so hard?

We were looking at finding a value for the intercept of a straight line graph when the scale of the graph made it difficult to have an X axis that started at zero – we were setting up and solving a simple equation within a context.

This second whiteboard processed using ScanR was taken in [...]

Black rust form mould grows in concentric circles

Convection cells in a round bottomed flask

An audio lesson on easy areas with a single one side sheet of diagrams. This will be used by at least one student who can’t make the lesson because of shift pattern change.

MS PowerPoint on Pythagoras converted to Flash animation using OpenOffice 2

Flash animation generated by Open Office 2.0 from an MS PowerPoint presentation

Flash animation about basic Area formulas produced using OpenOffice

1600 watts is (apparently) the rating of a modest 35mm film projector in an arthouse cinema…

Flash from PowerPoint on a perimeter presentation with mini-exercises

Calculates chi-square for a two number table, and applies Yates’ continuity correction

Open Office 2.0 can export PowerPoint presentations as rudimentary flash animations

Preview allows you to cut diagrams out of PDF files and save them as PNG or JPG files

Spreadsheet shows effect of adding two phase shifted sine waves

Pop some graphs on the gcse blog and ask for the equations by e-mail?

“Gestures that complement rather than simply illustrate verbal instructions can boost children’s ability to complete problems in mathematics, researchers report.”

Complementary gestures are illustrated as…

“When using complementary gestures, however, the teachers pointed to each of the numbers on the left and then signalled the subtraction of the five on the right side by scooping their hand [...]

Put the whole of GCSE Maths where you can see it

According to the BBC News quoting research by doctors in London and Shrewsbury, there may be a link between migraine with aura and a hole in the heart. Their figures (quoted from the BBC article) are as follows…
“The latest study screened 432 migraine with aura patients, and found 24% had a moderate [or] large PFO [...]

Notice any trend? Upwards? Downwards? Part of a sine wave of longish period? Scribble an idea now, then compare with the full series.

The chart above (shown without axes on purpose) is a plot of the yearly mean temperature from 1800 to 2005 taken from the Central England Temperature series. The series extends from 1659, as [...]

I once heard the Beaufort Scale rendered as epic poetry. The reader started in a quiet conversational tone, speaking fairly quickly. As he ascended the scale, the voice grew louder and the pace slowed. The word ‘HURRICANE’ was bellowed at considerable volume.

The table below was copied from a notebook entry made one foul day in [...]

A recent post to the Real Climate blog details recent work on satellite images of Greenland showing the volume of ice flow into the sea from the glaciers that surround the coast.

The numbers are large – 220 cubic km of ice per year is currently flowing from the glaciers into the sea. That apparently corresponds [...]

I think I understand what labyrinth tiling might be, but I’ll need to check… It looks nice anyway, especially the labyrinth produced by just looking at the horizontal or vertical edges.

The demonstration version of Reduce for Windows (scroll down page when it loads) – a computer algebra package – can be used to factorise large prime numbers (and polynomials!) as a way of demonstrating the properties of large numbers. Interactive sessions on a projector (the fonts are a bit small but there is no [...]

“Until the 19th century, there was no concerted effort to standardize musical pitch and the levels across Europe varied widely. Even within one church, the pitch used could vary over time because of the way organs were tuned. Generally, the end of an organ pipe would be hammered inwards to a cone, or flared outwards [...]

Gender differences in the mendelian ratio?

Maths for the Million – what new chapters would you add?

Original periodic table had gaps and forced re-measurement of many atomic weights and other properties.

Vernier calipers and the venerable screw micrometer allow us to measure small objects with a resolution high enough to see random variation.

Internet use figures tablulated with populations for a list of countries

Nice and clear site on stats for genetics by Jim Deacon from the Biology Teaching Organisation, University of Edinburgh. Useful examples in context and helpful dos and don’ts. There is a section on experimental design as well, and a page that helps people choose the appropriate statistical test.

Freeware stats package for Mac OS X, Linux, Windows

Latest results on new experiments…

A little bit of VBA goes a long way…

Three PowerPoints contain a brief presentation on substituting and a ‘game’ that encourages group work

BBC radio program about history looks at prime numbers

Quiz suite written by esol teacher is at version 6 and getting seriously useful

What would a ‘survival pack’ for science students contain?

Java applets allow exploration of geometrical relationships by dragging

Draft of SD notes for study pack

Draft notes on how to calculate the well-known statistic

Excel on projector helps provide rapidly updated charts to trigger discussion

Read all about it coursework: a useful list

The transit time of a planet can help you find the planet in the sky and can help plan observing trips

fx-83ES defaults to maths mode with surds and fractions

MS Excel or any spreadsheet on a projector with whole class questions

Christopher Alexander was a visionary architect and philosopher. This Web page summarises one of his better known books. Much used by computer scientists.

PhotoShop or similar image editor provides a way of measuring a scanned image accurately, but you need Pythagoras…

50 questions at level 1 and 2 on Number

When photographers include the Moon or Sun in a picture, you can find the angle of view and the focal length of the lens by a simple application of trigonometry.

Mathworld by Eric Weisstein is a huge online reference

Mathsnet is a web site that provides interactive demonstrations of maths topics

Is the hand painted decoration on my Taramundi an accurate logarithmic or equiangular spiral or not?

Looking at things through a simple jeweler’s loup can provide a refreshing ‘take’

I’ll see how gelosia and russian multiplication go down

Use a systematic method to list factors and you get them all

Nice quiz – pity about the feedback

Most people born abroad live in the South of England – especially London. New statistical analysis decouples immigration from ethnicity.

Use the ‘forms’ toolbar in MS Excel to link a slider control with a cell. Then you can make ‘dynamic graphs’. Projected onto a screen, you can ask students to predict what the result of a change is going to be.

Download a spreadsheet that simulates breeding 60 fruit flies
The spreadsheet simulates the results of breeding fruit flies (F2 Generation – Second Filial?) where the expected outcome is a simple 1:3 Mendelian ratio of vestigial winged flies to winged flies
The screen shot above shows an anomalous result – a chi-squared statistic well above 3.84, the critical [...]

What is the smallest number of squares of different sizes that can be joined together to make a square? Answer: 21

Try using 4 colours to colour in some maps – harder than it looks

Controversial replica calculating machine is based on a sketch in a ‘misplaced’ manuscript by Leonardo

Some links to examples of constructions of common shapes and online drafting aids

Analogue synthesisers – a hoot with op amps and noise

Strange geometrical pattern found in 1840s building

Left Hand, Right Hand, Chris McManus, Phoenix, 2003, ISBN 0-75381-355-6

Beware the use of symbols of a graphic nature in maths lessons – you may have students who take the lesson the wrong way

Maths on the Web is a problem – html entities can provide a limited range of symbols – and I like the immediacy of a blogging approach to Maths. Else it is down to PDFs or scans or Whiteboard captures.

A spreadsheet uses simplified low precision formulas to calculate the altitude of the Sun and the Moon for each hour of a given day. Change the latitude to see the effect of moving into the arctic circle. Change the date to see the effect of slipping towards Winter.

How far has your dinner travelled? Perhaps half way round the planet!

Web site aims to motivate keyskills lessons – self test quizzes and practice tests.

Six datasets based on reproduction experiments with fruit flies – used for chi-squared statistics calculations

Probabilities can only be multiplied if events are independent. Sudden child deaths in the same family cannot be regarded as independent.

The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences published a series of 12 monthly posters on tube trains in London during the year 2000. The posters are available at moderate resolution on the Web and can still be purchased as a set from The Mathematical Association’s online shop – a nice tie in.

The posters were designed [...]