Why Eurovision is a sham

I love Eurovision. I love it because you often see something different or weird or silly. It’s mad and that makes it great.

But recently Eurovision have tamed these impulses. They’ve started to make it less silly and, quite frankly, more boring.

They’ve done this with judges votes. There was a time when telephone voting was all that mattered. And that led to things like the UK giving this glorious entry by Lithuania 10 points in 2006. It also led to Lordi winning in the same year. Lordi!

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This year’s winner was Sweden. It was an OK song. But it was very safe for Eurovision.

But DID Sweden win? Did the judges make a difference? Luckily, there’s a way to find out. Eurovision publishes it’s full results. I simply took out the judges voting and ranked all of the countries by phone voting. (San Marino appear to have to have not done telephone voting, so I’ve excluded their results. This means that their judges decided to give Electric Velvet 3 points. Madness)

According to my calculations, Italy won. By a lot. Here’s the final standings:

Italy 349
Russia 282
Sweden 272
Belgium 190
Estonia 144
Australia 124
Israel 102
Albania 93
Serbia 86
Latvia 83
Armenia 77
Romania 69
Georgia 51
Azerbaijan 48
Poland 47
Noray 37
Montenegro 34
Lithuania 32
Slovenia 27
Spain 26
Greece 24
Hungary 17
Cyprus 8
Germany 5
UK 4
France 3
Austria 0

I’m glad in the real results Germany did better than our AWFUL entry. Sad to see no points for Austria.

I think Judges votes were brought in to get rid of ‘political’ voting (ie countries near each other and having similar cultures liking the same type of song). If that’s the case, it’s failed spectacularly. Russia have LESS points with telephone voting than with judges and telephone voting. All it does it hurt acts like Italy, Eurovision outsiders.

Let’s also talk for a second about another outsider. The learning disabled act Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät, who played punk rock. Not Eurovision’s usual thing. They didn’t make it through the semi final.

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But here’s the thing, they should have made it through to the final. They lost exclusively on judges votes. Televoting actually favored them significantly. If it was just based on the voice of the people we’d have seen Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät in the final. And it’s a shame we didn’t. Because since Conchita Eurovision stands for something. Maybe it always has, but it’s more obvious now. It’s about inclusiveness. About similarities not differences, and I think to exclude this band because of the type of music they play was rubbish.

I don’t normally ask people to share stuff. This is a maths website aimed at providing resources to other maths teachers, but please share this. Hopefully if enough people see this, the system might change.

Peace out. My spreadsheet here-> ESC-2015-grand_final-full_results

Problem Solving : Which phone contract is best?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about problem solving.

The new maths GCSE introduces a lot of it, and some of the sample questions I have seen include almost Fermi-like questions.

I’ve always liked problem solving, I particularly like the Dan Meyer stuff, but I’ve not written much about it. So here is an example of a problem solving lesson I’ve created.

Problem Solving Lesson : Phone Contracts. 

Equipment required: 
Graph paper
A3 paper

Prior Knowledge Desirable:
Linear graphs

I simply showed students this slide.

phonecontracts

We talked about it for a while. I have obviously had to massively simplify the problem. I was upfront with students about this. We talked about contracts and a little about data, texts and things like WhatsApp meaning that they didn’t really need minutes. This time was important. These questions about the validity of the task I think helped draw out thinking and were useful in getting students into the task. It’s important not to shoot students down when they ask them.

We then talked a little about how the task seemed simple. But it’s deceptive.

The real question comes in how we present our answers. Students started to ask questions. How long does the average person spend on the phone? Do different users have different needs? This last question unlocks the potential of the task.

Which phone is best for which person? How many minutes do you have to be on the phone for before buying the initially more expensive phone is the better option? How can I show this information clearly? 

Students came up with a variety of responses. Not everyone used graphs. Some went around and surveyed other pupils to find out how long they sent on the phone. I liked that idea.

Not all answers/conclusions were of high quality, you can see a selection of student work below, but I’m OK with that.

I will look at these and give feedback next lesson. Hopefully they will gain confidence in this sort of task.

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Kahoot!

If you’ve ever used either Quizdom or the ActivInspire voting paddles, you’ll realise that they’re quite good for assessment and for plenaries. Unfortunately they have a few draw backs. For one, most schools don’t have many sets (the voting paddles are expensive) and the equipment is often bulky. This is really inconvenient when you simply want a ten minute plenary at the end of lesson.

Kahoot! aims to make things a little simpler. For a start, it’s free. That’s always a bonus as a teacher. Secondly, it’s got a nice, simple web interface that makes creating quizzes a breeze. I find the fact that Kahoot! looks lovely, with nice snappy animations also makes pupils more engaged than the comparatively boring/laggy Quizdom animations.

All you need to do is pick your questions and answers and get students to go to http://www.kahoot.it on their mobiles. There they can you use their fancy smartphones (which most kids have) to answer questions and compete. The website also has a fantastic section of public Kahoot!s you can browse and search for. I like the sharing element. I also like the idea of getting students to create their own Kahoot! as a homework exercise.

There are a few things I’m less keen on. I think quizzes often promote a frantic ‘me me’-ness that I think often ignores higher learning in favour of surface level facts. I often make the other answers common misconceptions, but I still find the class frenzied at the idea of completing the quiz and not particularly bothered about the maths.

The other problem is with Kahoot! itself. It’s a lovely website, but lacks a few features (it NEEDS image embedding for answers, so I can show a picture of a circle as a possible answer) and the initial setup can be a bit of a trial. But I’ve enjoyed using it, and I recommend that you at least try it.

It’s interesting how websites are slowly starting to fill a lot of educational need. With Desmos, Kahoot! and the new, revamped, FANTASTIC Class Dojo, I’m really excited to see what else people come up with in the next few years.

PS: Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I am going to  try and get more stuff on here soon.

KenKen Puzzles

Since finding this on TES, I’ve become midly obsessed with KenKen puzzles. They are like Sudoku (which I already think is fantastic at developing the kind of maths skills I want to see) but much more mathematcally involved.

There’s a load of these puzzles on the linked PowerPoints, or you can just Google ‘KenKen’.