Technical Help



Using NRICH with a small screen

NRICH uses a fixed width page layout which fits within a 1000 pixel wide screen at 100% zoom. So, if you can, adjust the resolution of your display so its width is 1000 pixels or more. However, you may have an old small screen, or you may need to use NRICH with a data projector limited to an 800 pixel wide screen. It's very easy. Simply use the scroll bars, and you'll find that we've adjusted the line length of all problem and article texts so they fit onto an 800 pixel wide screen at 100% zoom.

In the Firefox, Safari, and Opera browsers, you can adjust the browser zoom controls to reduce the page to fit. However, all versions of Internet Explorer that we've tested have buggy zoom controls and are best left set at 100%. The IE bugs cause misplaced inline mathematics.

Choice of Browser

Due to the buggy zoom controls and the difficulties with scaled jsMath in Internet Explorer, we'd recommend you use something else if you can. If you can't, then using the standard size text and 100% zoomed pages will give reasonable results in IE6 and IE7. The site is designed with reasonably large fonts throughout so things should be nice and visible. Of the Internet Explorer versions, IE7 is currently the best option. IE8 has introduced another batch of javascript bugs that lead to some poor mathematics displays, and IE6 has many CSS layout issues which we attempt to work around. Let's not mention IE5. If you can possibly use Firefox or Safari or Chrome you will have much better and much faster displays - not just for NRICH - but for almost every web site you visit.

Displaying Mathematical Notation

Making mathematics notation appear correctly on all web browsers is not very easy! We are now using a very handy javascript library called jsMath for the purpose because it works well without you needing to download and install anything. However it does look a little better if you do take the trouble to install the mathematical fonts which are available from the jsMath support site. In the bottom right hand corner of each NRICH page you'll see a button that allows you to set various jsMath options. It also links to the jsMath support site where you can download those extra fonts.

Accessing Flash animations

The NRICH site makes good use of the free Adobe Flash Player for its rich media content, such as exploratory mathematics, games, interactive puzzles and movies. Chances are that Flash is already installed on your computer, but it's worth checking that you are using the latest version. There's a link to download or update your Flash Player at the bottom of every page.

Full Screen Versions

Many of our Flash animations have a link to a Full Screen Version above them. This opens the Flash animation in its own page so it can grow to the full size of the browser page, so making it more useful on an interactive white board. To return to NRICH from the full screen version, simply press your browser's Back button.

If you only see a blank screen when you click on a Full Screen Version link, then you are probably running a copy of Internet Explorer that needs some settings changed. To fix the problem, go to the Tools menu, choose Internet Options, and select the Advanced tab. There, look for the option described as 'Allow Active Content to Play in Files on My Computer'. This option should NOT be checked. Internet Explorer allows direct access to networked animations, or to local animations, but not both at the same time.

Some more recent animations have a Full Screen button inside the animation itself. This will grow the animation to fill the whole computer screen. Use the ESC key to return to normal viewing in this case.

Accessing Java interactivities

In order to view some of the NRICH websites interactivities, you may need to install the free Java Plugin . You may need to do this even if you have a version of Internet Explorer preconfigured with Microsoft's java.

How 'Search NRICH' works

There are lots of ways to find material on NRICH. You may be looking for material linked from the curriculum mapping documents in which case you should start there. You may want to find something that you know was published a few months back - in which case try Past Issues . For most other purposes - whether you want to search through text, titles, or topics - it's best to start by typing some words into the Search NRICH box.

It helps a little to know how this works...

Using the Search NRICH box

There are two phases to the search. The second phase only happens if the first phase fails to find anything. Both phases search in resource text, resource titles, and resource topics (sometimes known as tags)

Phase 1 - a word search

If you type in geometry algebra you will find documents containing both words. Typing more words will find documents containing some or all of the words you type, ranked according to how many are found, how close they are together, and whether they are team favourites.

This phase of the search will ignore many common words that occur so often they are unhelpful in finding material. It also ignores words of less than 4 letters, and any string of characters that does not make an English word. For example, in phase 1, mul and mult will be ignored, but multi , multiple , and multiply will all be used.

Phrase searches are not supported, so don't use quotation marks.

It's worth taking the trouble to cast your search in a form that will be picked up by phase 1, because the search can then rank your results by how good a match they are. If your search terms appear close together in the resource, it is likely to appear near the top of the search results.

The NRICH team has some favourite resources which we know you will appreciate. These too will appear high in phase 1 results.

Phase 2 - a string search

If phase 1 fails to find anything at all, a phase 2 search will happen. In this phase, the search will attempt to match the complete string of characters that you typed in the Search NRICH box. In our example, mul and mult will be ignored by the phase 1 search, but will turn up many matches in the phase 2 search.

In phase 2, everything you type is used - spaces and punctuation included.

The Search Results

The main list of search results appears below some links that may help you to refine your search. Use these links to select a problem, game, article, package or key stage. The links to Matching Titles and Matching Topics take you to result pages where these have matched.

Note that these refinement links only appear if they lead to at least one matching resource. You won't be led to an empty results page if you click on them.


search engine page