World Maths Day

Tomorrow, Wednesday 7 March 2012, is World Maths Day by UNICEF. And what a great time it is to be a Maths teacher!

Today we had Years 3, 4, 5 and 6 from Primary come up to Secondary for a Maths activity on population growth with our Year 7 and 8’s. It’s so satisfying to see children enjoy ‘doing’ Mathematics. Today’s activity involved going on a Mathematical adventure to an island where the population doubled each day ultimately leading to students (yes even the Year 3’s) drawing the graph of ‘two to the x‘.

I was recently lucky enough to take six students (U15) to Singapore for the South East Asia Mathematics Competition 2012 (known as SEAMC 2012). This is an annual competition held in SE Asia (surprisingly?!) that is now attended by 240 students from over 40 schools in the region. It’s a wonderful event and is all the more special given that schools have no common connection (some American, Canadian, Chinese, British etc.) other than a group of students who love (and are pretty good at) Mathematics. It is inspiring as a teacher to walk into a hall where there are so many students enjoying Mathematics working on various individual and group challenges, puzzles, problems and activities all with a smile on their face.

Each year at this event there is a guest speaker who gives a talk to the students as well as the staff over the course of the weekend. This year that guest speaker was Douglas Butler. A tremendously creative, innovative and experienced Maths teacher with a passion for using technology to teach children Mathematics that is infectious to all those that meet him. He is so good at what he does that he is part of the team to have written ‘Autograph‘, a piece of Mathematics software being used by schools all over the world now. What is so wonderful about this software that does all sorts of graphing and modelling is that it has been written by a Maths teacher rather than a software engineer so is designed with teaching in mind.

Software packages like Autograph and others like Geogebra have helped to make Maths a little more interactive and bring the subject more to life. Through being able to easily model popular games like Angry Birds into Mathematics, illustrate matrix transformations geometrically so swiftly and having the ability to display difficult concepts such as 3-D vectors and planes to make it easier to visualise what is happening behind the algebra.

 

Use Mathematics to model the birds path

So, a little insight as to why it’s a great time to be a Mathematics teacher, oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the upcoming ‘Pi Day‘, 3rd month 14th day…

Do you enjoy Maths? Do you teach Maths? So many people say they hate maths or were no good at Maths at school. Are you one of them? If so, why?

If you are a Maths teacher and have a similar passion for the subject and think we are in exciting times, leave a comment (we even have a vacancy in our department!).

-PlaneSimple