bodmas blog

Download a 6 page worksheet

Following the TROL example, I am adding some PDFs of worksheets here. The first is 40 short questions for revision for students taking an Access course – this first test is non-calculator. Topics covered include

• Whole numbers, fractions and decimals
• Percentage and simple percentage problems
• Basic Unit conversion
• Ratios (including foreign currency)
• Basic probability

Students will get model answers to mark their work against. Usual disclaimer: this is something I put together for my students on a particular course. It might save you an hour or so – it might not.

Teacher Resources On Line has a lot of downloadable PDF files with quizzes, problems and mini-investigations. Could be useful. The arithmetic practice PDF file has 12 pages of puzzles around tables and simple arithmetic operations but presented in a puzzly way with number squares and other visual shapes. Could be handy for use with Access students who need to increase their confidence with basic maths.

MisMaths is a collection of misuses of Maths in the media collected over a period of years. Some of these are very funny, and I will use some of the percentage/fractions mis-statements when I’m teaching percentages soon.

A big thankyou to the University of Hull Study Advice Services crew for making their worksheets and leaflets available online without password protection.

I’ll be using the excellent Mathematics Practice for Nursing and Midwifery (a PDF file) available to my access students over the half term as revision and a bit of a challenge for the most able. The fact that this handout comes from a University setting and has calculations within the vocational context will be most helpful – students on Access courses take this kind of thing seriously.

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• jbex va cnvef
• hfr n gnoyr bs crepragntr serdhrapvrf bs gur yrggref va gur nycunorg naq n ovg bs pbzzba frafr gb qrpbqr gur zrffntr
• rapbqr n zrffntr naq fraq vg gb nabgure cnve guvf vf cercnengvba sbe fbzr jbex ba gur cflpubybtl bs pbzchgre unpxref.

Did it work?

18th Oct: Well, the codebreaking activity went down quite well – the students were determined to solve the rather simpler rot13 message given. They had a table of the frequencies of letters in English words. I used this as an introduction to the hacker mind and why hackers use online communities so much. The logic was as follows…

• Work in pairs
• Try to find as many letters/words as you can (Scrabble?)
• (after 5 min) Share your information with other pairs
• Work as a class group of pairs to solve the problem
• Can you find a rule for the ‘substitution code’ being applied?
• How many bytes of information would it take to send someone details of the substitution rule? Less than a table of 26 letters and 26 coded letters (ie less than 52 bytes plus spaces)?

The feedback went along the lines of…

• How did you feel working on the puzzle?
• How did sharing the information from other pairs help?

Results with a mature day group were interesting: two of the pairs got a long way to solving the puzzle – they had about 10 words sorted – using frequency analysis and guesswork from the shape of the words.

When we pooled the information from the pairs, the combined result was much better and one member of a pair that had ‘switched off’ became re-engaged and spotted the rule (move letters 13 along)

The moral is obvious – Cognitive puzzle solving is hard but hackers can multiply their efforts by using online communities.

• I suggest you use a very simple page design and navigation for course sites
• In my opinion, that means…

** a home page that acts as a course diary

** a contact form

** a page with downloadable files such as the scheme of work

• the course diary should have carefully chosen links added each week at the top of the page so students can find extra material about what is freshest in their minds
• Jakob Nielson’s Altertbox summarises the reasons
• Frank Spillers disagrees with Nielson but his main gripe seems to be Jakob’s writing style

Bruce Sterling’s 1992 book The Hacker Crackdown is still available free on the Web. Sterling had the uncommonly neat idea of reserving the digital rights to his book and putting out a free copy. As Bruce says…

“The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown, and commercially the book has done well. On the other hand, I didn’t write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don’t have any money—(no, not even enough for the sixdollar Hacker Crackdown paperback, with its attractive bright-red cover and useful index). That’s a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb to the temptation to do things they shouldn’t, such as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back. *8-)”

• Moodle 1.35 asks for more than 8 Mb of RAM from the php process when installing all modules
• The workround is to delete modules and then continue to install
• Set up the admin account and added a thumbnail (at last) which displayed properly
• Got Internal Server Error on index.php
• So back to Moodle 1.41 (which is on the main development map anyway) and I’ll live with no thumbnails for now