News July 2009


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Out and About

We are always out and about in schools, colleges and universities, working with a variety of teachers, professionals and students. These are some of the activities that members of the team have been up to in the last month:

Jennifer Piggott - NRICH Project Director

For Jenny, June has been an eventful month with lots of work out and about in the community. Rather like a national tour!
Early in the month Jenny gave presentations at events in Glasgow and Belfast to teachers attending the annual UKMT days. In the coming weeks, other members of the team will be presenting at similar events throughout the country.
A visit to Wiltshire gave Jenny the opportunity to work with teachers involved in a local Independent-State School Partnership programme. A Saturday workshop with the Yorkshire branch of the MA took place at a beautiful spot just outside Leeds - the Moravian Village.
The West Midlands NAMA group invited Jenny to work with a mixture of Primary and Secondary consultants. They spent the afternoon doing lots of mathematics and talking about the latest NRICH developments.
In Gloucester Jenny worked a day of two halves. In the morning with Primary coordinators and consultants and in the afternoon with secondary heads of departments, consultants and advisers. In both sessions the groups looked at rich tasks and thought about issues such as APP (assessing pupil progress) and how rich tasks can aide assessment. Jenny hopes to be working on APP over the summer so watch this space!
A workshop at the SSAT Maths and Computing annual conference in Warwick with David Cherry from the Thomas Deacon Academy was a great success. David and Jenny talked about our work on the Engaging Mathematics Project and how David's school has integrated rich tasks into their scheme of work. Charlie, Jenny and Alison have also been working on articles based on the project for future publication in MT.
Three workshops at the NANAMIC conference near Doncaster on the following day involved using NRICH to support functional skills for learners up to level 2, rich tasks at A-level and a session on stemNRICH, when everyone practiced their fractions by working on dilutions.
At the end of the month Jenny spent a second day working with colleagues from a school near Durham. The department is developing themed units of work built around rich tasks.
Jenny has also been working on material for the site, teaching in the Faculty of Education and helping with planning for the Enrichment strand of the BCME conference in Manchester from 6th to 9th April next year and helping with the planning of the Fast Forward summer schools and the Teacher Inspiration days.

Liz Woodham - Primary Coordinator

On June 25, the sixth and final curriculum development day in Haringey took place. We reflected on the year and each participant thought about how they would continue to work with rich mathematical tasks.

Liz led several workshops for teachers during June. She was involved with the BEAM conferences held in Manchester, Bristol and London, and she was also fortunate enough to work with teachers in the London boroughs of Havering and Newham. She led a session at the UKMT teacher meeting in Manchester and spent a day working with two groups of trainee teachers at Birmingham City University, as well as leading a workshop for another group of ITT students in the Faculty of Education here in Cambridge.

On Saturday June 13, Liz introduced a group of Year 5 children to some mathematical games on the website as part of a primary masterclass held at the Royal Institution. Together they used the mathematics they knew to develop strategies for winning each game. A few days later, Liz was back at the Ri to attend the annual masterclass organisers' meeting.

Liz met with other members of the Primary Team (Bernard, Lynne and Jenny M) to begin work on resources for Early Years Foundation Stage practitioners which will appear on NRICH soon. We had a very productive day thrashing out ideas and we would welcome your thoughts.

As usual, Liz has continued to work with colleagues on primary materials for publication on NRICH in future months.

Charlie Gilderdale

In June we finalised our plans for the July Teacher Inspiration Day, the last one in the current series. Teachers from four of the secondary schools that collaborated with us on the Engaging Mathematics for all Learners Project, and contributed to the QCA guidance document, will take the lead running the workshops.

To see the summary of the discussions from our previous meeting click here. For information and an application form for the 2009-10 series click here.

The students from the schools involved in the Wimbledon Independent-State School Partnership Project spent a day in Cambridge, visiting various Colleges and the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. We worked on a couple of favourite NRICH problems: Semi-regular Tessellations and Classifying Solids Using Angle Deficiency.

As usual, continued to develop Stage 3 resources for the website.

Steve Hewson - Post-16 coordinator

This month Steve worked on the development of a new beta release of stemNRICH. To help, NRICH have 5 science and engineering undergraduates working on the project for 1 month over the summer, along with a Nuffield Bursary school student, who will be working closely with Steve. As a part of this process, academic consultants from chemistry, engineering and biology departments will meet to provide input.

Steve attended and spoke at the 3rd Hills Road Engagement, Enrichment and Networks in Science Conference at at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge. Following this, a Mathematics Knowledge Network will hopefully be created to develop methods to use the stemNRICH resoureces in cross-curricular teaching at A-level. Other good contacts with science teachers across the eastern region were also made.

Steve presented a poster and session on how stemNRICH can assist in the school-university transition at the Transition to University: Seminar and Workshop event at St. John's College, Cambridge, organised by the Cambridge University Transkills Project.

Steve went to the Secondary Masterclass Organisers Workshop and the Royal Institution to find out about other maths enrichment programmes.

Steve also ran two teacher workshops (one on Learning to solve problems in Functional maths, the other on teaching mathematics in engineering and scientific contexts) at a STEM summer school at the National Science Learning Centre in York.

Additionally, Steve spent time developing new web pages for Natural Science Students in mathematics at Cambridge University and thought about ways to develop material to aid these students in the school-university transition.

Finally, Steve helped to plans the Fastforward and Teacher Inspiration events and worked on the general stage 5 areas of NRICH.

Alison Kiddle

This month, as well as working closely with Charlie on developing resources for Stage 3, Alison has been developing some resources on proof for Stage 4, particularly visual proofs. These will be appearing on the site in the coming months.

Alison also attended the Royal Institution Secondary Masterclass meeting - the first time she had visited the Ri and a very interesting and inspirational day.

Alison was very pleased to have the opportunity to work with Charlie and the students from the Wimbledon ISSP Project using one of her favourite activities, Semi-regular Tessellations.

At the end of the month, Alison led sessions at the UKMT teacher meetings in Leeds and in Cardiff, where the teachers enjoyed using the Virtual Geoboard to work on angles and circle theorems. The Remainders Game was also very popular!


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