Pokémon Go lesson

My colleague and superior who doesn’t want to be named designed a Pokemon go lesson. I asked him to upload it to the TES because I thought other teachers would love it, but he’s shy and scared of the internet, so I’ve asked permission to reproduce it here.

It is a rich task talking about the time it takes to hatch eggs. I understand none of it.

Artful Maths and the end of term

A rejected Harry Potter title, that.

Artful Maths is brilliant. Some lovely end of term activities on there. We’re running Curves of Pursuit as a session. I’ll be nagging my HOD to buy fancy coloured paper next year to do some lovely folding stuff. There’s more stuff like this in the ATM book Mathematical Imagery, apparently. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t bought the book because I’m tight. Shanghai are big on representations, and visualising stuff isn’t given enough. I’m obviously going to link to Don Steward now for a great example. I might rename this blog DON STEWARD LINKS.

You could always have a go at Mandalas.

I used to do the pirate game. Kids loved the pirate game, but it’s not got a great deal of mathematical content. It is REALLY fun, though.

A few years ago I made Maths Pointless. I’m less proud of it every year. I wanted it to work like the ‘proper game’ with animations and all sorts. It kind of does but it’s stuck with the limitations of PowerPoint. At one point I thought about learning Flash or JavaScript to make a fancier version, but unfortunately that never happened. I got the idea from Mr Collins.

Resourceaholic has some stuff for the end of term. Recently they celebrated their 1,000,000th visitor and there’s some good stuff on there. Not even my mum reads this blog 🙁

You could also do some fun Rio stuff.

Just don’t do a quiz, people. I’m really bored of quizzes.

 

Exam Solutions And A Request For IT Help

I’ve always loved Exam Solutions.

The videos are delivered in a clear and accessible way and I always watch them when I revisit a topic for A Level. It’s often helped me teach something in a more approachable or simple way.

I’ve tried to do my own Exam Solutions stuff before, but with limited success. The sound quality was always terrible, the writing was illegible. It’s much harder than it looks.

Part of the problem is, I think, IT. I’ve never managed to find a good setup to do something like this. I’m tempted by an iPad Pro and a pencil, but that ends up at nearly £1000 of setup costs. I’d need to sell a lot of resources on TES to fund that! I’ve been using a borrowed Samsung tablet from work to experiment, but I’ve found the pen input a bit rubbish.

Does anyone out there make these videos? Have you found a setup that suits you?

Rent To Own

I made a quick PowerPoint comparing rent to own companies like Bright House with buying goods outright.

Get it here

I think there’s a problem solving task in here. Collecting the items needed for an everyday house and comparing the cost of buying them outright, buying them with a credit card and buying them with Bright House.

Financial literacy is important for students, and it’s a shame it wasn’t foregrounded more in the new GCSE.

I would like to see a syllabus that included as an objective the ability to compare credit card and loan deals, and the ability to compare, both in cost and in time, the outcomes from paying off the minimum each month versus other sums.

Maybe that’s a summer project.

Paper

I’m going to admit something: I often don’t enjoy teaching constructions. It’s fiddly. No matter how much you demonstrate whole-class, there’s no substitute for sitting with someone and showing them how to hold and move the compass.

One solution is experts. Getting competent students to pair up and help less competent ones.

Another solution is to use A3 paper.

Pupils are often unwilling to make mistakes in their books. OFSTED have been picking up on messy work, and there’s been a lot of focus of students showing that they are proud of their work, and presenting it as an exemplar document. I’m not so sure I’m a fan of this. Often working can be scrappy. There’s an argument to be made that this working can be done somewhere else and thrown away, leaving us with a beautifully presented bit of work. But this denies the reality that sometimes maths work isn’t a lovely linear process. I don’t know how I feel about the entire thing.

Anyway…Using A3 paper like this makes students way more confident in failing and trying again. It also allows them to ‘doodle’ (practice using a compass which is useful).

It can lead to much nicer results than trying to do anything in their books.

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