Download a PDF with 48 Numeracy Level 1 questions broken down into 4 ‘days’ worth of homework.

Ruth’s been clearing out and found an old 10 Mark note. I could not resist scanning the detail with the Normal distribution on the front face next to the portrait of Gauss.

Download a PDF file containing a four page worksheet with graph plotting questions.

A tale of two solutions.

A search engine for Maths. You can type things like “y = (x+1)(x-1)x” or “weather Birmingham UK 2008” and get graphs and data. You can type a search term like “x^3 – 2x = 10” and the system will solve the equation exactly or approximately and draw graphs.

Download a metric units quiz. One side of A4 with a question where students match a measurement of an object (weight of new born baby, height of typical door) with the corresponding value (3Kg, 2 metres). Then the students have to find objects in the room that are various sizes. Finally some questions involving simple [...]

Algebra The BasicsView more presentations from keithpeter.

Click on Full Screen View on the slideshare.net player above (bottom right of the player, icon looks like a projector screen) to use on your interactive whiteboard.

Just one side of A4 on simplifying expressions, including collecting terms, multiplying terms, cancelling down algebraic fractions, and multiplying out brackets. Needs directed [...]

Just 10 questions a bit like the Level 1 numeracy test with answers.

Download a single sided worksheet with 14 mixed area and circle questions with numerical answers.

Nothing amazing, just some practice questions for Level 2 Access Maths students. Covers areas of rectangles, triangles and composite shapes, together with circumference of a circle, and area of a circle. The worksheet also has a couple of those problems [...]

Adding Fractions: traditional approachView more presentations from keithpeter.

The slideshare presentation above is my attempt at explaining how to add fractions to a group of students taking the Level 1 Adult Numeracy Certificate. This particular group is aiming at joining an Access to Higher Education course next year, and so I’m using a more ‘academic’ style [...]

Introduction to Fractions using SweetsView more presentations from keithpeter.

Slideshare from an OpenOffice Impress presentation on the basics of fractions. Based on an idea from Malcolm C. It worked for his students so I’ll try it out with my Level 1 Adult Numeracy students.

A couple of worksheets coming as well…. You can download a PDF of [...]

Download PDF file containing a one side worksheet with 28 questions covering the four functions, writing numbers from words and rounding. Numerical answers on the sheet.

The graphic above (taken on my little Fuji compact digital camera in macro mode) shows my check answer for the long multiplication. I had to actually calculate the answer as [...]

Download a jqz file with 8 questions about rearranging digits to make the largest and smallest numbers. You can also save a Web page with the questions about rearranging digits and use that with students.

As usual, I have set the HotPotatoes options to remove all the buttons (the quizzes open in new windows in Moodle), [...]

Numeracy teaching with a healthy eating message.

Download a JQZ quiz file with 10 questions on rounding whole numbers of various sizes. You can also download a Web page with the quiz ready for use.

Part of the 20 minutes project, written on the way in on the train.

Hot Potatoes quiz on place value in whole numbers up to the tens of millions

Download a HotPotatoes quiz JQZ file for writing numbers in figures and back again. You can also save a copy of the Web page export of the words to figures and back again quiz.

An example of 20 minutes a day e-learning but actually took 35 minutes because of the need to help a colleague switch [...]

Download a two page PDF file [ 10 Mb file ] with scans of the histogram and cumulative curve drawn from a frequency distribution of adult male weights (made up data!). The frequency distribution has a moderate skew and shows the way the mean, median and mode spread out under those circumstances. The frequencies and [...]

Just a tree diagram that builds, based on a with replacement problem

Central tendency and dispersion PowerPoint on Slide Share

PowerPoint presentation sets the scene for a new topic and includes a mind map

Students mark incorrect answers: they avoid making the same mistakes

I’m trying a visual way of introducing those reverse percentage story problems that go like this: “Fred has had a pay rise of 10% and now earns £22000. What were his wages before the pay rise”.

Ratio and proportion problems introduced visually

areas of the states projected so that they are proportional to the number of seats in the electoral college. By Mark Newman

Quick And Dirty Fractions MethodView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fractions maths)

I use this quick method for adding two fractions of moderate size with Science students who need to revise basic numeracy quickly. The method is less efficient with large numerators and denominators and with denominators that have large highest common factors.

Most [...]

Free geometry software

More than once on internet mailing lists I have encountered people who ridiculed others for asserting that “nearly all x are above [or below] average”. This is a recurring joke on Prairie Home Companion, broadcast from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and [...]

Download a sheet of lattice multiplication blanks. Lattice or Gelosia multiplication has gone down very well this year with Access Maths students. The blanks save a bit of drawing in the sessions.

I’ve noticed that the YouTube above and some of the step by step explanations of lattice multiplication handle the carries in a slightly different [...]

Download a PDF of a BODMAS quick quiz. Print it out and use in the first ten minutes of the lesson to test how much was absorbed in the last lesson!

The reverse questions help understanding I find. Adult students want to know the reasoning behind the methods.

A touring exhibition by Stan’s Cafe is a gift to Maths teachers. Statistics suggested by viewers, people represented by rice grains.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 value of the chi-square statistic at the 5% [...]

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 [...]

By popular request… Remember that a multiplying mixed signs gives a negative answer and multiplying same signs gives a positive answer!

h3. Multiply out the following

2(3x – 2) – 4(2x – 1)

2xy(x + y)

2(4x + 3) + 3(2x – 9)

4(x + y) – 2(x + 2y)

2x(x2 – y3)

2(5x – 4) – 3(2x + 7)

4(10x + 3y) [...]

The original OMC has been around for years and will  plot contours of ocean depth and continental height. You can pull the plots down as PS files or in Illustrator format. The beta version of Planiglobe appears to be rasterising the PS downloads – no contours.

The Generic Mapping Tools are GPLed and can be [...]

A BBC News article reports a survey by the Institute of Advanced Motorists into perceived driving risks based on a sample of 700 drivers. The survey finds differences based on gender and age regarding the risks.


60% of women drivers in the sample cited ‘tailgating’ as a major risk compared with 47% of male drivers in [...]

Thanks to Jeremy for this Web site…



Seems to have a good range of patterns including polar and log-lin. The metric rulings are on the right, and seem short of smaller divisions (i.e. 20mm/2mm isn’t there). The isometric papers could come in handy for 3-d drawing!

“The mistake made by the nurses was a mathematical miscalculation which in other working environments might not have been quite so catastrophic”

The quote is from the coroner in a case of a 15 day old baby given 10 times the prescribed dose of Digoxin to slow a fast heart rate and appears on the BBC [...]

Why A4 paper is the shape it is?

I’m doing some numeracy sessions for HND Chemistry students. I needed lots of specific examples and exercises within the area of Chemistry.


Basics with an emphasis on converting from everyday to metric units – US origin. Good stuff on density. PDF file, part of a

Stuff on standard form part of a

Timetabling (that three dimensional jigsaw puzzle) is occuring and it looks like I’ll be teaching a GCSE Maths course next year. Expect a week by week puzzle page. Hot Potatoes looks like the way to go with quizzes and puzzles delivered through a blog like WordPress with ‘future posting’. Animated formulas (see below) might be [...]

Napier’s Bones were a 16th century calculating device based on lattice multiplication, from the inventor of logarithms.

The Natioanl Library of Virtual Manipulatives for Interactive Mathematics is a Web site with a large number of Java applets that invite students to explore Mathematics problems.  ‘Manipulatives’ is the US term for things like Cuisenaire rods and Dienes blocks.

The Java applets are mapped to the US curriculum based on ‘grades’. I have [...]

Java game speeds up estimation with three digit whole numbers.

An alternate formula and why it might be easier to just use the standard one!

There is a simple graphical construction that you can add to estimate a more accurate value for the mode of a grouped frequency distribution (see the red lines on the sketch graph below).



Can you write a formula for the value of the mode estimate in terms of the locations of the bar boundaries and [...]

Edward Lorenz was using a primitive computer (it was 1963) to numerically integrate an _apparently simple set of coupled differential equations. The computer worked to 6 decimal places and printed out each line to 3 places. Restarting a run, he noticed that the trace started looking similar but became slowly different to a previous run [...]

Planetqhe is a site by David Kay Harris dealing with probability. There are Excel spreadsheets that present problems in probability in a novel way, including

The presentation is different to the usual one in UK GCSE textbooks – Harris is head of Maths at the International School of Toulouse and the site is in English [...]

David E Joyce of the Clarke University has provided a set of Java classes that allow complex geometrical constructions too be built using parameters passed to a Java applet.






The geometry applet looks as if it could be used to provide dynamic graphics to help students explore locii and circle theorems without the rather imposing deductive [...]

rLogo is a Java based implementation of the Logo programming language. I used a simple ‘starter’ in a recent Maths lesson where students had to learn about the exterior and interior angles of a polygon and learn to solve problems along the lines of ‘can a regular polygon have an interior angle of 125 degrees?’.

On [...]

The starting square has side 1. Another side 1 square appears, and then a side 2 square is added across the top of them. Then a square of side 3 appears to the left, and a sqare of side 5 appears underneath.

The sequence of the sides of the squares is like this…

1, 1, 2, 3, [...]

recipe: 300ml of milk and three tablespoons of treacle – warm milk over electric hotplate in milk pan. Spoon treacle in and stir well.

looks lumpy but dries (in a few days) really convincingly
Students set up a dissection board or similar with some wall paper afixed – set the board at known angles
drop the simulated [...]

The NFER has a long term project (started in 2002) tracking students’ experience of citizenship education. The most recent report is referenced as follows….CLEAVER, E., IRELAND, E., KERR, D. and LOPES, J. (2005). Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study: Second Cross-Sectional Survey 2004 Listening to Young People: Citizenship Education in England (DfES Research Report 626). London: DfES


The [...]

The Centre for Innovation in Maths Teaching based at the University of Exeter provides a range of materials for free download on their Web pages. In particular, there is the Mathematics Enhancement Programme for key stage 4 that provides GCSE maths materials as PDF downloads. There are 20 units available, and the units are provided [...]

A series of Java based statistics simulations provides covarage of most aspects of statistics at level 3 and 4 (Normal distribution, skew, sampling, tests of significance)
These are part of the Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics and you can download the lot as a ZIP file (or as JBuilder source code)
The site also includes a stats [...]

The headmap sphaeric web page has a simple geometrical method for finding rough positions of the planets based on using concentric circles to represent the orbit of the planet and of the earth.

I’ll re-work this a little minus the ideology.

Note added 27th Feb : errors prove large for Mars. The smaller signal is the declination [...]

Cumulative frequency curve summary from the Teacher Training Agency!
The TTA material covers the syllabus for the Numeracy test that newly qualified teachers must take
The material is presented as Web pages that are also available in a plain form for printing out

There are interactive practice tests available as well as written questions
Could be handy for Access [...]

The Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching has a range of simple Web pages that set up a problem in a context using GCSE level Maths.


Chance of false matches in DNA matching (genetic fingerprinting) is a useful leader for a lesson on combined probabilities – and directly useful to Forensic science students!

Mistaken DNA Identification has [...]

The diagram above is re-drawn from Mike Ollerton’s book Getting the buggers to add up published by Continuum. Most of the issues he raises for engaging children and teenagers are alive and well for adults...


Take away aspects of ‘behaviour’ – less challenging anyway

Add in a big set of built in hangups and partial constructs about [...]

Central Limit Theorem – you can roll up to 5 dice up to 10000 times and plot the frequency distribution of the total score. As you ‘roll the dice’ a second and third time, the cumulative score is shown so that the Normal distribution can emerge through repeated samples. Nice touch – imagine using this [...]

” The distribution of an average tends to be  Normal, even when the distribution from which the average is computed is decidedly  non-Normal “.

“Thus, the Central Limit theorem is the foundation for  many statistical procedures, including Quality Control Charts, because the distribution of the phenomenon under study does not have to be [...]

Histograms are meaningless for datasets smaller than about 500 items – you will be better off using a dotplot. I think that the ‘error bar’ for each bar of the histogram can be approximated by the square root of the frequency so that a bar with a frequency of 36 could have a standard deviation [...]

The MathsWorks Project has a series of laboratory projects on different aspects of Maths in Biotechnology. One of the projects is about blood spatter pattern analysis and has a very usable practical using milk to calibrate the relationship between drop stain shape and angle of surface.

There is also a good treatment of the mathematical assumptions [...]

The Genetics Laboratory Manual from the University of South Florida has plenty of detail on Drosophilia Melanogaster and the various genetic manipulations available.

You can simulate the Mendelian inheritance of a simple trait using a couple of coins and some patience – and a Chi-Squared statistic can be calculated from a table of observed and expected [...]

These are mostly first year University level but the datasets, examples and general approaches might be useful for Unit 6 on the BTEC Applied Sciences


Darren Wilkinson is making his Statistics teaching notes, PowerPoint slides and homework exercises freely downloadable as PDFs

John Matthews distributes his Biomedical Science Statistics module notes as PDFs

Professor Matthews’ Summary Measures and [...]

Filippo Brunelleschi was the mathematician and artist who designed the dome of S. Maria Novella in Florence. How much maths did Brunelleschi know? Did he know about astronomy, and could he use an Astrolabe ?

I was able to find a paper mapping his friendships with local mathematicians and astronomers and astrolabe dealers using the [...]

Numeracy support material for nursing is based on a numeracy course in the department of Health Studies at York University.

There is a lot of useful vocational context here and some nice examples, alas hampered by dated Web design (frames based site, flash animations used to convey material, assumptions made about screen size and so [...]

The mathscentre Web site has a growing collection of resources in a variety of formats – short leaflets on key numeracy skills (all of fractions on two sides) to longer packs of materials.

The student portal maps leaflets and revision books by vocational subject but often the leaflets are generic. The Web site does not appear [...]

James Brennan is providing his Understanding Algebra book free for online access. This algebra text is geared to US educational requirements and styles but there is a lot here that Access students doing science modules could use.

The book is pure exposition of the basics – few worked examples and no problem sets. I found it [...]

Following the TROL example, I am adding some PDFs of worksheets here. The first is 40 short questions for revision for students taking an Access course – this first test is non-calculator. Topics covered include


Whole numbers, fractions and decimals

Percentage and simple percentage problems
Basic Unit conversion
Ratios (including foreign currency)
Basic probability

Students will get model answers to mark [...]

Teacher Resources On Line has a lot of downloadable PDF files with quizzes, problems and mini-investigations. Could be useful. The arithmetic practice PDF file has 12 pages of puzzles around tables and simple arithmetic operations but presented in a puzzly way with number squares and other visual shapes. Could be handy for use with Access [...]

A big thankyou to the University of Hull Study Advice Services crew for making their worksheets and leaflets available online without password protection.

I’ll be using the excellent Mathematics Practice for Nursing and Midwifery (a PDF file) available to my access students over the half term as revision and a bit of a challenge for the [...]