Tag Archives: math

Slumdog Pythagoras – Minimally Invasive Education

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Inspired by Sugata Mitra at the SSAT National Conference I decided to try and ape his ‘minimally invasive education‘ within my own Maths classroom.

In a really tough December week this two hours shone out as a great teaching and learning experience.

Before going any further, please head over to my previous post to read about the inspiration for this lesson.

In a nutshell, Sugata discovered that children can teach themselves with the aid of the Internet.  His hole-in-the-wall experiment inspired the book that inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire.  He has since been investigating how to apply these findings in Western school systems.

I followed some basic rules that Sugata has developed.  I split the students into groups, each with a computer and then gave them a problem to solve.

The rules are simple:

  • Students were told to get into groups of their choice of around 4 children.
  • They had one laptop per group.
  • They could walk around and cheat, looking at what the other groups were doing.
  • They could move groups if they wanted to.
  • No input from me other than some encouragement and praise.

My Year 7 class (11-12 year olds) are an able group who I have done a little group work earlier this year.  I gave them a simple question:

Who was Pythagoras?

And with it, the text (but not diagram) of a typical GCSE question:

A ladder is leaning against a wall.  It is 5 meters long, the base of the ladder is 3.5 meters away from the wall.  How far up the wall does it reach? Continue reading →

Gapminder Updates – Great for Maths, Science, Geography, Social Studies, History & More!

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Scrolling through things I had starred for holiday reading, I noticed that Gapminder.org has been updated.  I have blogged previously about Gapminder and the fantastic Hans Rosling, it is a fantastic tool for visualising a wealth of World data on lovely scatter graphs that animate changes through the years.

Watch one of Hans Rosling’s classic TED talks to see what it’s capable of:

There have been a number of great updates which can be seen in this diagram I’ve borrowed from Gapminder.org:

You can see the blog post detailing these on Gapminder, but to summarise: Continue reading →

Twitter in the classroom rocks!

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Following yesterday’s use of Twitter in the classroom, I was walking to Period 5 (same class as yesterday) after lunch, when inspiration struck.  I remembered this post from @tombarrett .

Go and read it.

Go on!

I threw my lesson plan out of the window and did exactly what Tom did, here are the replies: (click through for them all)

This caused great excitement and interest in the topic, and really helped us look in to the language and mathematics of describing chance.

This class have really been inspired with the idea of my network, I had to stop them spending the rest of the lesson bombarding you all with further questions!  Bringing global connections into the classroom is a real attention grabber, and like it or not we are entertainers!

Nothing more to say – thanks Tom –  a great idea, and thanks to everyone who contributed to the lesson.

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Questionnaires Take 2 with Twitter, Google Forms & Wallwisher

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I had an observation lesson today and decided to pull out all the technology tricks!  We happened to be at a point in the scheme of work looking at data handling and collecting data in particular.  I decided I’d develop the Questionnaires lesson which I used at interview last year.  60 minutes should be enough to do it more justice.

So here’s the plan:

  • Discuss data quality based on previous lesson
  • Tweet a link to my questionnaire and a Wallwisher for feedback on the questions
  • Fill out my questionnaire full of deliberate mistakes in class
  • Look at the live data spreadsheet
  • Groups look at the data for one question, suggest problems with the data collected, and suggest improvements to the data.
  • Discuss findings, looking at key points of: Leading Questions, Bias, Open/Closed Qs, Personal Qs, Options Boxes, Group boundaries etc.
  • Look at Twitter feedback on Wallwisher, compare to our own thoughts
  • Each team leaves one learning point on our own Wallwisher.
  • Compile new Qs into anew Questionnaire

Continue reading →

Augmented Reality Maths – Your Ideas Please

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I attended a SSAT training day today about ensuring Maths progress for all. This included a 30 minute section about using IT within Maths. During this Paul Hynes from the SSAT demonstrated an augmented reality program that the Trust are currently working on.

For those new to the term Augmented Reality it involves overlaying virtual images on top of a live video stream. Some of the first examples are on the iPhone and the PS3.

Here is an iPhone example called Nearest Tube, directions to the nearest London Tube stop are overlayed onto the image from the phone’s camera:

Continue reading →

TeachMeet North West – My Presentation

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I’m doing a quick presentation at Teach Meet North West tomorrow night in Manchester.

If you haven’t been to a Teachmeet before it’s an ‘unconference’ where enthusaistic teachers get together to share ideas, usually with an E-Learning theme.

I’m doing a 2 minute nano-presentation on Google Forms, based on my interview / blog post from earlier in the year.

Here’s the presentation.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there :)

BrainPOP Maths Videos

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First up a disclaimer: The lovely people at BrainPop UK offered me & my school a free 3 month subscription to their site in return for a post on their new Maths videos, this is said post.

With that out of the way, what’s BrainPop?  The website has videos for many subjects, all starring Tim and his beeping robot friend Moby.  Subjects covered include: Science, English, Maths, Humanities, Arts, PSHE, Citizenship & Design & Technology.

Tim & Moby can probably explain it better than me, head over to there introductory video here.

Continue reading →

cre8ate maths

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Cre8ate maths is a fantastic set of rich mathematical activities developed by the Centre for Science Education (CSE) with the mathematics lead from the Mathematics Education Centre (MEC), of Sheffield Hallam University.  They have been created to support schools in Yorkshire & Humberside, and are focussed on the 12 priority industry sectors of the area.  Activities are based around the chemical industry, food production, childcare and many others.

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Data Collection & Questionnaires with Google Docs & Twitter

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Interview Reflection: Part 2:

My interview lesson was rated as ‘good with outstanding features’ and as that was in part thanks to my network I thought it only fair I shared it with the World.

I chose to teach a lesson focusing on data collection using questionnaires. A tricky lesson to get right I finally nailed it!

I feel there were two keys to the success of the lesson:…. Continue reading →

LEMA – Open Mathematical Tasks for the New Curriculum

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I have had the great pleasure of being involved in a project involving the Central & East Manchester High Schools. We have pursued a project started by universities in Manchester and across Europe.

The LEMA (Learning and Education in and through Modeling and Applications) Project was developed to support teachers to incorporate mathematical modeling in their classrooms so that learners gain experience of using mathematics to solve substantial problems. Full details can be found on their website: http://www.lema-project.org/web/eu/tout.php . Several Maths teachers from the City worked with the University of Manchester on this last year.

In conjunction with funding from the Greater Manchester Challenge we decided that we should continue this project to develop resources for Key Stage 3 (11-14yrs) that would cover the requirements of the new National Curriculum.

In a nutshell, LEMA tasks are open ended mathematical problems that require an assumption based model in order to solve. By their nature they help develop pupil: Personal, Learning & Thinking Skills; Functional Skills and show the Cross Curricular Dimensions.

Here are a few of examples:

Y7 Algebra 2 Traffic In A Jam

View more presentations from mrstucke.
Y7 – Geometry 1 – Cheap Cars

View more presentations from mrstucke.

We have met a number of times and created 3 complete sets of tasks, one for each standard topic in the Maths curriculum. Although a joint effort, a great deal of the effort and credit must go to Dave & Leanne from the Maths department at Wright Robinson Sports College.

If you would like the full set of tasks we have produced so far they are available here: Y7 Core, Y7 Support, Y8 Core. Tasks for Y9 will be available soon. Although split into specific years and abilities these can easily be mixed and matched to suit most classes.

Key to successful LEMA lessons are the skills of team working and communication along with being able to make suitable assumptions to solve the problems. At first pupils will need some guidance on how to tackle a task like this but we have found that they quickly adapt to the problems and develop the skills needed. Groups of around 3 to 4 pupils seems to work best. Once they are used to tackling the tasks it is possible to start getting groups to present their work, both as posters on A3 and as oral presentations. I think that these presentations are key to improving our pupil’s ability to verbalise their maths.

I hope these are of use to other teachers, again, I can only take a little credit for this – it’s been a great collaborative effort. I hope we’re not using the LEMA name without permission either, this part of the project has not been completed in conjunction with the universities.

What have you been doing to teach the skills required for the new curriculum?

Have you any suggestions for similar tasks?

Are there any other resources along these lines available on the Web? I can recommend Dan Meyer’s ‘What can you do with this?’ series: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?cat=70.

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