Download a PDF with 48 Numeracy Level 1 questions broken down into 4 ‘days’ worth of homework. Each homework lasts about 20 minutes.

• Whole numbers
• Fractions, decimals and percentages
• Units, areas, volumes
• Money!

You will need to do your own answers until I get near my scanner. I wanted to show standard methods in these questions. I’m thinking of giving homework broken down into 10 or 20 minutes a day next year.

Download a PDF file containing a four page worksheet with graph plotting questions. There are two questions about plotting quadratics in the first quadrant, and these questions include plotting a straight line and reading off the intersection points. Another question is about finding the gradient and intercept of two straight line graphs and then writing down their formulas. A further question asks the student to plot two straight lines from supplied formulas, making up their own points.

Just a quick job using a spreadsheet to generate the grids and graphs (actually, I simply drew the straight line graphs onto the grid generated by a speadsheet).

My solution is above, including the question. When I was spending spring afternoons in the pavilion doing maths homework, I hit on the idea of only using the sine ratio, Pythagoras’ result and the sine rule to solve these problems as it reduced the amount of things I needed to remember. I’ve used sine rule in the large triangle and then found the inclination of the road. This was a nostalgic exercise, and, as a result of not being able to find my Godfrey and Siddons or a scientific calculator to hand, I found myself using Wolfram Alpha to look up the trig ratios.

Steve Nicholson’s solution from daringfireball.net. This solution has gone for ‘projecting’ the pole shadow onto the horizontal and then solved the small triangle using sine rule.

I’ve used Wolfram Alpha on the projector all this week with various Maths classes, mostly level 2. We are covering topics like ‘trial and improvement’ solution of equations and plotting quadratic graphs. The general response has been positive, and students have been quick to recognise that ‘you still have to understand the steps’, that just getting the answer has limited value in itself.

‘Searching’ on terms like “4.5Kg + 500g” produces answers in terms of both the units used. Terms like “y = 3x + 1” produce graphs, but you can’t alter the x or y range, and Alpha picks intervals that contains important features like zero crossings.

One group of three mature students who have GCSE and want to study AS Maths next year used Wolfram Alpha for half an hour in an IT session (it was my differentiation activity as most of the class were looking at BBC Bitesize pages or on s-cool for interactive equation solving activities). They solved an equation, admired the exact solution, and this lead onto research for the cubic formula. The statistics search lead to speculation about the impact of systems like Wolfram Alpha that can cross reference large quantities of information from a variety of sources. I’ll be revising my Mathematica commands to work out how to take the mean temperature figures for a number of UK cities over a period of time (smoothed means?) and to plot them geographically to show the gradient from North to South. A graphing task lead to the accidental discovery that Mathematica regards capital Y used in an expression as meaning the Bessel function, and it takes a guess at the order. Graphs need to be specified using lower case y and x variables!

I’ll work out more ways of using this system in the classroom. Searching on “prime factors of 68128” gives a list of the prime factors, so there could be activities early next academic year.

I used the OpenOffice ‘note’ tool to add the answers to the quiz questions. Notes are annotations on the text that appear linked to a word or phrase on the right hand side of the document. You can make them invisible for printing a clean copy. The notes survived export to Word Doc format as well. In Word, you select View | Mark Up to ‘toggle’ the visibility of notes.

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 numbers. You can download a one side A4 handout on simplifying expressions as a PDF file saved from the OpenOffice Writer original.

You can see this handout at Scribd.com, but the embed code looks funny when I paste it into my blog, so its broken so far as I am concerned.

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 like “a bicycle has wheels 90cm in diameter, how many times to the wheels turn when the bicycle travels 1.6Km”. Those questions bring in units conversions, although I think map scales might be more useful for that.

The presentation above on SlideShare shows how I introduce the idea of central tendency or location and the concept of spread or dispersion. Most Level 2 Access Maths get the idea and go on to compare frequency polygons drawn from supplied data sets and from data they collect themselves.

The slide above brings home the idea of spread – I try to find illustrations relevant to the ‘pathway’ (easiest for the health professions students). Vocabulary is important in statistics so look out for some crosswords…

The pale yellow background and large text are to suit a student with a specific requirement in one of my groups. I might try a ‘slide cast’ in SlideShare, but you have to fiddle with timings for each slide transition so I might talk through the slides in my YouTube format.

The Ratio and Proportion PowerPoint is available for download [ 600Kb ]. The cous-cous packet simply happened to be on the table when I was thinking of problems… Onto percentages…