News October 2009

It is with a great deal of pleasure and relief that this month we heard of the success of our bid to the Templeton Foundation for funding. We will share more of this in the near future, but the funding does make a considerable contribution to our costs and thus our survival. The website and much of the work of NRICH is secure for another three years and in the meantime we will continue to seek funding from other sources.

During September, Jenny worked with colleagues from a school in Derbyshire (where she will be returning later in the term). The department are keen to move their work on integrating rich tasks forward. Jenny is helping them think about how to present and use NRICH and similar materials with students of all abilities.

Jenny also spent a day working with colleagues from the London Borough of Lambeth. The aim is to return later in the year, having given the schools time to try things out, when we will come back to talk about successes and share ways of addressing issues.

Jenny has also been spending time thinking about asssessing pupil progress in key process and problem solving. An article she has written will be appearing on the site in November. She also completed the NRICH annual report which can be downloaded from this page.

Liz spent five days in Aberdeen leading workshops for primary children at TechFest. She extended her stay in Scotland to run workshops for teachers at the Stirling Secondary Education Maths Conference, run by the MA, on September 19.

Liz was also invited into a primary school in Surrey to run a half-day CPD session for all staff, and spent the last two days of the month with teachers in Wales. The Math Cymru project has been running successfully for several years now but this year sees a shift towards primary mathematics. Liz looks forward to working with the teachers over the coming academic year.

This term, Liz is involved with a research project led by Gill Potter to investigate the potential of connecting pupils in different schools together in an online space to work on mathematics together. This trial began on September 21 with three groups of learners (in Cambridge, London and Reading) being introduced to an online classroom and rich mathematical tasks from NRICH. In the next few weeks, the idea is for the children to work on the problems and games in the online classroom, and to share their thoughts via the forums. We will all meet again 'virtually' next month to reflect on progress.

Towards the end of the summer holidays we welcomed the new cohort of Fast Forward students. Read about it here. We have already begun planning for their return in December.

We have also been busy preparing for the 2009/10 series of Teacher Inspiration Days which starts in October. If you would like to receive details of the 2010/11 programme, please email us and we will add you to our mailing list.

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

This month Steve has been reviewing many of the problems from stemNRICH and planning for the next few months of material on the main NRICH site. We now have three project assistants who will be working with NRICH to help to develop the A-level content in a way which makes the site most useful for those engaged in the transition from school to university.

Alison has had a very busy month, despite going on holiday both to Berlin and Derbyshire. She has been planning for the first Teacher Inspiration Day of the 2009-10 series, where she is looking forward to leading sessions based on problems developed with Charlie earlier this year.

Alison has also been busy planning sessions for this year's Enriching Mathematics project in Tower Hamlets, which is going ahead thanks to generous funding support from More Maths Grads and Queen Mary, University of London. Alison is very much looking forward to working with a new cohort of Year 8 pupils to challenge their mathematical thinking and show them the benefits of working systematically.

Alison has also been working closely with Charlie this month to develop Stage 4 resources which extend and develop ideas from the Stage 3 section of the website.