Welcome to NRICH


Last look at the jungle
Welcome to the new-look NRICH, and take a last look at the old jungle themed site on the left. Don't worry, this is more of a tidy up than a radical change and we are sure you will find your way round very quickly. If something you are looking for isn't in the top menu, try the For Teachers or For Students menus. Things like the Curriculum Mapping documents are linked from the 'For Teachers' menu, as we hope you would expect! The Maths Finder is now called 'Search by Topic' and a link to it can be found just below the search box at the top-right of every page. If you have any problems with displaying the site try the Tech Help link which is also close by.

Everything you have come to expect from NRICH will still be here but we hope the 'For Teachers' and 'For Students' sections will help you find what you are looking for more easily.

About NRICH

Members of the NRICH team work in a wide range of capacities, aiming to enrich the mathematical experiences of all learners. A list of some of our current activities can be found here .

The NRICH website offers free mathematics enrichment material (problems, articles and games) for teachers and learners from ages 5 to 19 years. It supports teachers and learners of mathematics with thousands of resources which are designed to develop subject knowledge and problem-solving and mathematical thinking skills.

For guidance on how to find the right resources for you, go to the Help section of the site.

The NRICH team offers on-line and face-to-face professional development support for teachers wishing to embed rich mathematical tasks into everyday classroom practice.

Each month we create content for the website focussing on a particular theme. This month's theme is Analysing. A list of the themes of previous issues can be found here .

This month

To represent the theme of analysing, all the problems and resources this month offer opportunities to think about, and practise, aspects of problem solving, such as making connections, using knowledge of similar problems, visualising and making and justifying conjectures. The 'Notes' accompanying each problem are there to help give teachers an insight into how 'analysing' might happen in the classroom.

In particular:
Why not practise your visualising with Taking a Die for a Walk or with Just Opposite
Make and justify conjectures with Magic V's or with M, M and M
Work logically on Cops and Robbers or the game Slippery Snail
Make connections with Catalyse That!

In addition, Steve's article on exploring rich mathematical tasks describes what we mean by 'rich tasks' and one of the inevitable consequences of engaging in them: that you get STUCK. But that's OK!

Finally, we have another article in our series on the history of mathematics . This month Leo is putting Geometry into perspective!

News update

Curriculum mapping documents

The Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3 and Stage 4 mapping documents have been updated this month.

First Teacher Inspiration Day a great success

On Friday 24 October, over one hundred teachers attended the first NRICH Teacher Inspiration Day at Churchill College, funded by Goldman Sachs. A keynote speech from Sue Pope of the QCA set the day off to a flying start after which teachers spent the day working on problems they will try out in schools before they meet again in March 2009.

Ten million times mathematics

September 2008 was the first month in NRICH's history that we exceeded over 10,000,000 hits to the site in one month. In October, hits topped 11,000,000 exceeding even September's staggering achievement.

For more news on NRICH activities...