TSA NRICH Day October 31st 2018

NRICH DIrector Ems Lord led a series of sessions throughout the day aiming to share ways to maximise the potential of NRICH in the classroom. This page is intended to share links to the activities from the day and act as an aide-memoire, both for delegates as well as those who were unable to atttend the event, about some of the most effective ways to utilise NRICH in different settings.

Keynote

Our day began with a guided tour of the NRICH website, led by Ems. NRICH is often described as 'the home of rich mathematics' and Ems explained the history behind the project and its widening remit to cover ages from Early Years through to university entrance by offering school free, high quality resources. NRICH is a collaboration between the Faculties of Mathematics and Education at the University of Cambridge. NRICH is also part of the wider Millennium Mathematics project, which is also based at the University of Cambridge, and Ems highlighted some of the most useful resources that the projects produce for schools, including:

Plus - a free, monthly online magazine exploring maths in the news

https://nrich.maths.org/13491

Maths and Sport - two sets of resources which offer excellent opportunities for cross-curricular links :

Olympics resources (originally designed for London 2012 but updated to reflect subsequent events at Rio 20160

https://sport.maths.org

a set of maths and football resources presented with Premiership team Arsenal FC

https://sport.maths.org/content/afc

STEP Support Programme - a set of resources designed for students preparing to take university entrance examinations such as STEP

https://maths.org/step/welcome

Attention in the session turned to the NRICH site itself, especially the vision behind the NRICH resources. Ems shared the 'rope model' whereby conceptual understanding and procedural fluency are developed alongside a productive disposition, strategic competence and adaptive reasoning:

https://nrich.maths.org/11796

To illustrate one way in which NRICH brings that vision to live, Ems modelled use of the Olympics Records resource with the delegates:

https://nrich.maths.org/7489

A key aspect of NRICH is the opportunity for children to submit their solutions for publication, Ems encouraged delegates to explore the solutions for Olympic Records, drawing attention to the learning from outside of mathematics that the children brought to the problem as well as the ways in which they drew upon their Habits of Minds such as pattern spotting trends in the records over time. Schools can submit solutions to Live Problems, and our NRICH newsletter alerts teachers to the latest Live Problems as well as updating readers when the solutions have been published on NRICH too. Advice for schools wishing to submit solutions can be found here:

https://nrich.maths.org/7503

For children to develop fluenct problem-solving skills, they need regular access to curriclulum-linked, high quality resources. To enable teachers to maximise the potential of NRICH in their classes, the NRICH team have linked those resources to freely-downloadable curriculum maps which can be accessed from any of the Teacher Home Pages or the NRICH Home page itself:

https://nrich.maths.org/

WORKSHOP

After a welcome coffee break, delegates attended the first of their two workshops. The NRICH workshop (which was run twice during the day) offered the delegates an opportunity to explore NRICH beyond the confines of the curriculum mapping documents and progress towards using our Habits of Mind collections:

Primary: https://nrich.maths.org/12639

Secondary: https://nrich.maths.org/11409

Altogether there are four sets of Habits of Mind collections, covering both primary and secondary age ranges, and Ems drew attention to the Being Collaborative resources. NRICH has recently competed a pilot project, funded by Nesta, exploring ways for schools to adapt existing resources to develop collaborative learning. In today's session, Ems shared some of the findings from the project and modelled a number of the resources which delegates can use back in their own settings, including:

Stringy Quads https://nrich.maths.org/2913

Five Steps to Fifty https://nrich.maths.org/10586

Shape Draw https://nrich.maths.org/10368

PLENARY

As our day drew to a close, delegates gathered together from their various workshops to explore the latest NRICH website, Wild Maths!

https://wild.maths.org/

This new resource is aimed at children rather than adults, there are no Key Stages or Teacher Notes. Instead, children are encouraged to roam freely between different activities and enjoy a huge range of activities and topics, such as:

investigating infinity

https://wild.maths.org/tags/infinity

learning about the role of Florence Nightingale in the development of statistics

https://wild.maths.org/compassionate-statistician

reproducing a cut out snowflake

https://wild.maths.org/make-snowflake

The day finished with a team effort, aiming to beat the computer in a game of Got It!

https://wild.maths.org/got-it

Although the delegates were narrowly defeated by the computer on this occassion, several members of the audience declared that they were intending the revisit the resource and reverse today's outcome!