Category Archives: Games and Puzzles

HP Prime in the Palace of Westminster

Next week Tim Peake is going to the international space station. This is an important moment in UK space. The UK space agency has organised a whole raft of school activities, events, resources and so on to coincide with his mission. One of these is the Space to Earth Challenge. The essential idea here is that pupils will find wacky and amusing ways to travel the distance that Tim will travel in returning to Earth and track their progress in doing this. I was commissioned by the project and HP to write a set of maths activities to develop the mathematical thinking involved in the parallel science and PE activities that had been developed. Continue reading HP Prime in the Palace of Westminster

Count On Us Challenge: Congratulations to Kender School!

Kender School in Lewisham are the winners of the Mayor’s Fund for London’s Count On Us Challenge.

Val from the Maths Zone takes on Johnny Ball
Val takes on Johnny Ball!

Very well done to them and very well done to all of the schools who took part. The grand final took place yesterday at City Hall with 13 schools who had won their way through heats and semi finals to compete at solving 24®Game puzzle cards. Each card has four numbers; you can add, subtract, multiply or divide in any combination, but you must use all four numbers to make 24. Continue reading Count On Us Challenge: Congratulations to Kender School!

The MathsZone Course Boxes

We’ve been very busy at The MathsZone. Feedback from schools suggested they really love our gifted and talented courses Illuminate and Wondermaths, but they already have some of the materials that come with them. So, we’ve done a major re-design. Still the same fantastic courses for your gifted and talented students at key stage 2 (Wondermaths) or key stage 3 (Illuminate), but now in a neat plastic storage box, which will go on your book shelves. Each one has a comprehensive teacher guide detailing the structure and purpose of all of the sessions, with commentary and solutions (where appropriate!). For the students we have organised the materials into a beautiful student workbook. Now your students can keep all of their work in a really attractive book which they keep at the end of the course. Game cards, dice and counters are included for the activities.

There are fewer puzzles directly referenced in the course, so the price is lower, but of course you can buy all of the puzzles separately to extend the activities. Illuminate comes with a CD Rom with all of the course materials and additional materials for projection. Wondermaths has an associated web site with the materials available. When you are ready to run the course for a second time, you can get extra sets of 10 copies of the workbooks. The key objective for the teacher is to get up and running with the minimum of fuss, so you can focus on supporting your students explore their mathematics.

The aim of both course is to give students the opportunity to explore mathematics. Wondermaths has games, to compare strategies, puzzles to develop sustained thinking and investigational maths top explore maths language and move towards explanation and proof. Illuminate aims to develop the ideas of pure mathematics for those who are limited by the algorithmic nature of school exam courses. Students will develop and compare proofs, while exploring the nature of proof itself. Their is a comprehensive section on group theory, fully accessible to ordinary school students. Games strategies are developed and compared and the course ends with a project in fractal geometry. These are really course in the mathematics that mathematicians would recognise.

Playing Maths Games Makes You Do Better at School!

OK, so I came to this by being responsible for public maths events for maths year 2000. We had 22 shopping centre events, at the end of January 2001, where we set up staffed table stands with maths activities. It was humbling to see ordinary shoppers give up on Sainsburys and spend the day doing maths puzzles and games. So, the I end up being a part time shop keeper selling maths games and puzzles. It is just great to keep being reminded that people love doing this stuff. Continue reading Playing Maths Games Makes You Do Better at School!

Making it ‘Real’

As owners of a games shop we are honour bound to play games at Christmas! No really, we do love them. So, Val, Katie (13) and I played a game of Risk. Now Risk is not so PC overall but, well, when you have made an alliance with the mass armies (in this case of the evil of middle earth) and they have attacked your opponent on your behalf and your turn comes round and you now realise you can renege on your agreement and wipe them out … well that is tough. Emotion, scruples, morality all bound up in tough decision making. Now I think you really (up to a point seriously) do have to debrief after a game like that, but is sure is that you are in the situation making the decisions … a history lesson for sure but not just discussing the issues cold. Continue reading Making it ‘Real’

Assessment

I had an interesting conversation with a former maths teacher who was telling me how much she disliked ‘investigations’. She said that you could never tell whether a student had done the work themselves or if their Dad had done it for them. It was clear to me that steering the conversation round to wondering about the difference between investigating mathematically and submitting GCSE coursework, wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I had to nod and force a polite smile. On one level it was deeply depressing how pleased maths teachers were when GCSE coursework was abandoned for maths exams. On the other, the whole process had been so discredited … Continue reading Assessment

Maths Events

I was asked to run a session for PGCE students using a kit of parts we make called Maths-for-a-Day. Basically, we took the content of the kits I had produced for the shopping centre events I organised during Maths Year 2000 and packaged them up in a box suitable for a school maths event. I asked for 6 volunteers from the group to staff the activities and the remainder were punters. Continue reading Maths Events

Maths Puzzles: Sustaining Activity

At higher level GCSE, it is possible to get a grade B having got 60% of the paper wrong. Since this is the benchmark for moving on to an A level course, there could be a concern that students could decide, say to avoid learning algebra and concentrate on geometry and statistics in order to get the B (or vice versa). In the main, the questions that they choose will have one or two steps at most to a solution, or if more are needed then guidance will be offered in the form of question structuring. In these circumstances, more extended A level questions, where the mathematics required may cover more than one area, would prove a significant culture shock. Continue reading Maths Puzzles: Sustaining Activity