bodmas blog

A touring exhibition by Stan’s Cafe is a gift to Maths teachers. Statistics suggested by viewers, people represented by rice grains.

A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked—and to predict how to beat it.

From How [...]

Using illustrations to convey concepts can save time and can support students who have a visual orientation. Drawing a visual representation of a set of ideas or a process forces you to think in a different way compared with linear text. A project run by several Universities in Europe has resulted in the visual-literacy.org Web [...]

gOS is a version of Linux that is intended to be easy to use and designed around what most computer users want to do (Web, photos, music, e-mail, documents). The distribution is based on Ubuntu, in turn based on Debian, but the gOS people have made an honest attempt to make the desktop easy to [...]

A school in Dagenham was loaned seventeen Summa 20 and six Divisumma 24 [calculators] in an experiment to teach maths. The Olivetti machines replaced log tables and slide rules for two groups of 11 to 15 year olds. The first group were given 2.5 hours tuition to learn multiplication. Whereas the second group were left [...]