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# The True Scale Multiplication Grid

I came up with a neat idea for a multiplication grid visual the other day, and stuck it up on Twitter where it has been doing the rounds with unprecedented alacrity:

I’ve loved reading comments and seeing how people are using the grids already, with fellow teachers, students and your own kids (I’m making one on A1 squared paper for my son this weekend – here’s one 3-year-old who will know what multiplication means before he learns his tables, if I can manage it!)  A few of you came up with ideas for variations I could do, including starting the grid from the bottom-left to mimic a Cartesian coordinate grid, and emphasizing square numbers.  I’ve also done one with the prime factorization of numbers on one side of the diagonal, which I quite like.  I’ve put all the images together into a single pdf document to make it easier to access.  It’s on my website at www.thechalkface.net/resources/true_scale_multiplication_grid.pdf:

Please feel free to mess about with these, share them, modify them, distribute or display them.  I’d love to hear what you get up to, and in particular if you come up with any great ideas for investigations please share them in the comments section below or on twitter: @the_chalkface

My plan with the multiplication table was to give learners a clearer intuition for multiplication.  It is my firm belief that most difficulties students encounter with ‘hard’ topics like proportion, fractions and algebra usually stem from an inadequate grasp of, and familiarity with, multiplication.  There’s no point trying to teach expanding brackets until the distributive property makes sense numerically, for example, and the right sort of visual might help students to see not just the what, but the why.

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# Playing with Functions (and the function of play) in A-level Mathematics

I believe we develop our understanding of mathematical concepts in two main ways: making connections, and building familiarity.  New ideas are never wholly new – they build on previous ideas, or take one aspect of something we know and develop it somehow.  But until we spend time messing around with them, our understanding will only remain skin-deep.

Making connections – linking the new idea to prior understanding – will involve well-chosen language, examples and analogies on the part of the teacher.  However incomplete or flawed these are, if chosen carefully so as not to actively hinder future development of ideas, they can form a vital (if temporary) bridge to otherwise inaccessible concepts.  I have found the ADEPT method outlined on www.betterexplained.com to be incredibly helpful in developing and adapting my own explanations of tricky concepts to students.

Building familiarity – playing around with mathematical ideas – should involve both problem solving and open investigation .  Because of the time-consuming nature of play, and the fact that we can’t know in advance what the ‘learning outcomes’ may be, this method of teaching often takes a back seat in the maths classroom.  Fortunately this is not the case everywhere.  http://www.inquirymaths.co.uk/ champions the practice of providing students with a well-chosen prompt and giving them the freedom to explore the ideas that arise.

Bringing together both of these aspects – making connections and building familiarity – the rich tasks provided on www.undergroundmathematics.org are designed to emphasize the links between A-level topics and also encourage more open investigation than is found in the typical textbook or exam question.  The hard part is providing sufficient direction for students to access the problem, but leave enough room for the creative investigative problem solving that maths is really all about.

I recently used a couple of tasks from Underground Maths in a plenary lesson on functions for a year 12 class.  By this point in the year, students have worked with functions and graphs in the context of straight lines, circles, trigonometry, polynomials and calculus, and even statistical distributions or kinematic graphs, and a solid grasp of functions will underpin much of the upcoming year’s content, from parametric curves to circular motion, so I wanted to make sure students weren’t just memorizing the rules for translations and stretches, but developing a sense for functions that goes a bit deeper.

Slippery Slopes:

https://undergroundmathematics.org/calculus-meets-functions/slippery-slopes

This activity encourages students to consider how transformations affect gradient.  It provides sufficient direction to be accessible while keeping the questions broad enough to promote discussion – there’s no one correct approach, and working in a group gave them the freedom to discuss possible methods and gain alternative perspectives.

One student used differentiation to investigate the effect of stretches and translations on cubic functions, and was then able to make the next step, differentiating  to , proving the same results for a much more general case.  We also had discussion about how the same sort of process governs transformations of data (specifically why standard deviation is invariant under translation).

The second part of this activity turned out to be a great way for students to grapple with what changes and what stays the same when functions are transformed.  In particular, the fact that functions were only described in terms of a general function  meant students didn’t get bogged down in specifics, which can make it hard to keep a clear view of the problem, and could focus instead on how the input and output were affected by each transformation.

Can you find…

https://undergroundmathematics.org/trigonometry-triangles-to-functions/can-you-find-trigonometry-edition

Many students of physics already had a good grasp of frequency and amplitude, and were quick to apply their understanding in this area to the mathematical descriptions of horizontal and vertical stretches of trig graphs.  Again, students worked in small groups, but were encouraged to use GeoGebra up at the front to test predictions.  Some students dived straight in, finding valid solutions straight away for the one graph version, while others weren’t sure where to begin.  As they compared their approaches within groups, those who struggled saw methods they could attempt, and those who already had one solution were challenged to find alternatives, and then to generalise further.  Some students ruled out horizontal stretches for the tan graph problem because they wanted to maintain the same vertical asymptote, while others tried anyway, and spotted that the right scale factor would simply move a new asymptote into its place.  Some solutions were considered more elegant than others, but this was often a matter of personal opinion, and it was so nice as a teacher to replace “No, that’s not the right answer” with “Yes, that also works – and can anyone spot any more?  Can we describe them all?”

One student decided that moving a sine wave up by 2 was too boring a solution to the first challenge, so spent a happy 10 minutes looking for ever more obscure ways to solve the same problem.  I love lessons where students ask me questions I can’t answer, and it took me some considerable messing around afterwards for me to find an equation that would create the graph one student had sketched:

Unless you get the constants just right, the graph unravels like a broken slinky, and if you try to get too fancy you might just end up with this weird scribble:

This graph prompted a discussion about what it means to be a function, and provided a nice precursor to the whole area of parametric curves.  Whether or not it fit the requirements of the question was no longer the issue – the original activity provided a vital prompt, but when it was no longer needed to direct students’ curiosity, it was simply put to one side.

Keeping with the making connections theme, one student drew a periodic graph that wasn’t quite a trig function, and, with a bit of messing around with modulus function and vertical translations, we were able to reverse-engineer a partial equation:

An equation for the endless version was beyond us during the lesson, but the floor function came in very handily when I tackled it again after class:

What’s the difference between an abacus, a calculator and a smartphone?

What’s the difference between $8 \times 8$, $x^2$ and $a(x+b)^2+c$ ?

Some tools do one job, some many, and some have potential beyond what their designers ever imagined.  Functions are to algebra what algebra is to number – they provide a wide angle lens that allows us to ‘see’ the algebraic structures and patterns which would be almost impossible otherwise.  Now every student with a phone can use GeoGebra to investigate functions, I can’t wait to see the impact on understanding.

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# Why logarithms still make sense

Logarithms are a notoriously tricky topic for A-level students to grasp.  Having just about got their heads around laws of indices, we suddenly expect them to blithely apply a new – seemingly arbitrary – list of rules that turn index rules literally on their heads:

Some people argue that logarithms are an outdated topic and have no place in our curriculum.  They were useful back in the day, but smartphones have all but made calculators obsolete, let alone slide rules and log tables.  What need have we for this confusingly different mathematics?

The key idea underpinning logarithms is this: They are a way of counting multiplicatively.  And there are, in fact, many good reasons for wanting to count in this way, rather than in the traditional additive sense.

I asked my year 12 class how many Christmas trees were sold in the US each year.  One guessed “300 million” and another guessed (I suspect facetiously) “3”.  Given that the true number is around 30 million, which of these students was closer to the truth?  And if you went with the 300 million guy (who overestimated by 270 million) rather than the guy with the ludicrous underestimate (29,999,997 too low) then presumably you are using a different scale to gauge accuracy than a straightforward additive one.  Consciously or not, we usually prefer a logarithmic scale for such comparisons, especially when the values vary considerably in size.  The first guess was 10 times too big, but the second guess was 10 million times too small.

Without thinking too hard, where do you think the number 1,000 belongs on this number line?

While not many people would have put it right in the middle, most people’s initial reaction is somewhat further along than an additive scale would place it.  The true position is somewhere inside the blob above ‘1’ on an additive scale.  But isn’t there some sense in which a million is ‘halfway’ from a thousand to a billion?  Yes – a multiplicative sense.

Dave gets a 20k pay rise.  Is he much better off?  It depends on what he was on before, doesn’t it?  On the one hand, 20k is £20k, but £520k is only 4% bigger than £500k, while £24k is a 500% increase on £4k.  In fact, whenever we invoke proportion, we are dealing with a logarithmic number sense.

With this new form of number sense, we need new rules for moving along the number line, and that’s where thinking about numbers from the point of view of the exponent starts to really pay off.

If you haven’t yet seen the superb ViHart video on logarithms, I highly recommend it.  It makes sense of this multiplicative number scale beautifully.

When you start to look around you, there is evidence of a multiplicative number sense everywhere.

• How can going down from 2 cigarettes to 1 be harder than from 20 to 19?
• In what universe is having a 6th kid less of a big deal than having a 2nd?
• How could a 10th friend joining a party less noteworthy than the 3rd one?
• Who drives 10 minutes to save £5 off a £15 item, but not a £150 one?

Given that logarithms and this logarithmic number sense are such a natural part of how our brains interpret quantities, it makes perfect sense to try and find a rigorous mathematical way to represent and manipulate them.

Once the ideas behind logarithms make more sense, the intuition behind the log rules starts to become clearer:

The next step is to develop notation.  We need to provide students with a convenient way to ‘read’ the logarithm notation: “What power do I need, with this given base, to result in this number?”

And once we’re familiar with this, knowing which bases are most commonly used and why is always helpful:

And solving real problems early is always helpful, I find.  Compound interest problems should be well within the capacity of A-level students, but as soon as the unknown value is the length of time rather than the interest rate or the amounts, it becomes a problem of trial and error… or logarithms.  It’s worth explicitly demonstrating the distinction between problems involving powers that we know (that are usually solved by rooting) and those involving powers that we don’t know (that need this whole new function to solve):

The ‘number of digits’ interpretation of logarithms is a particularly helpful one.  While log10 isn’t exactly the same, if you round it up it gives you exactly that.  A really helpful idea from the excellent new Underground Mathematics website involves working out just how far up an exponential graph will go: https://undergroundmathematics.org/exp-and-log/reach-for-the-stars.  We need to grasp the fact that, as fast as exponential graphs increase, logarithms do the opposite, requiring us to travel literally miles along the horizontal axis just to reach a reasonable height on the y-axis (for the record, 500 miles along gives you about 1 handspan in height on a log10 graph).

I’ve made a PowerPoint with many of these ideas included, an Introducing Logarithms accompanying 8-page booklet, and a follow-on Working With Logarithms 8-page booklet:

As usual, I’d welcome any feedback / ideas / corrections on the ideas & resources included.

Just remember, next time you come second in a pub quiz tie-breaker, to check whether your answer was multiplicatively closest.  Although you should bear in mind that, until our newly enlightened year 12s start administering them, “because of logarithms” is an argument unlikely to carry much weight…

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# What are the chances of teaching a great probability lesson?

In my experience a probability lesson runs smoothly about 50% of the time.  Some days those pesky dice will throw sixes all afternoon, or some lucky sod will beat your thousand-to-one odds and win a fiver in the coin-toss challenge.  But if you play your cards right (‘scuse the pun) these lessons can be fun for you and the students as well as a great way to challenge our in-built misconceptions about randomness and chance.

Lucky Streak: Let’s start out with my headline act.  I encourage you to try this out for yourself before you read the spoiler that follows, to convince yourself it works:

Have you jotted down your fake list yet?  (A string of 0s and 1s in Notepad will do).  Now do the experiment for real (if you’re feeling lazy – or skint – use https://www.random.org/coins/?num=20&cur=60-gbp.1pound).  Did you notice anything odd about the real coin tosses?  The often surprising fact is that runs occur more frequently, and are longer, than we generally assume.  This experiment works better with more coin tosses, but 20 is usually enough to see some discrepancy between an invented list and a genuine one.  According to http://wizardofodds.com/image/ask-the-wizard/streaks.pdf, there is a more than 75% chance of a run of 4, and a 45% chance of a run of 5, though the actual maths involved is a bit beyond high school.  Fortunately he includes a handy graph.  The key idea is simple enough: a run of 5 means four coin tosses must show up the same as the previous one, which occurs with probability one in sixteen.  Makes sense that you’d expect it to happen somewhere in your 20 coin tosses reasonably often.  While the genuine results sometimes don’t have any striking streaks, it’s very rare for invented lists to have any more than 3 in a row before our built-in equalizer tells us we should really be balancing out the proportions.  The other day I tried this with four teams for my plenary activity, and correctly identified the fake from each of the four teams.  Coins, dice and roulette wheels are like Dory from Finding Nemo – getting a tail last time makes it neither more nor less likely to get one this time.  We teachers know this, but are just as likely to fall into the trap of avoiding streaks as our students.

The activity described above is a nice way to get students thinking about what they understand by ‘random’.  When my wife makes a patchwork quilt, a lot of time and effort goes into carefully arranging the various squares of colour to make it look random.  Itunes ‘shuffle’ mode is the same – the algorithm had to be modified because true random song selection would mean you sometimes have to listen to the same song twice in a row, or three from the same artist one after the other.  Once students have got it into their heads that the number 4 has a one in six chance of showing up, they expect it to show up pretty much once in every six throws.  Which, for small numbers of throws, isn’t all that likely.  I use this simple Excel spreadsheet to demonstrate the feebleness of small sample sizes, but also the awesome power of large ones when it comes to making predictions from a probability:

This can be modified to reflect whatever probability distribution you choose.  It’s worth pointing out that there are still ‘large’ gaps numerically between the most common and least common outcomes for bigger sample sizes, but they tend to become less significant as a proportion of the whole.

Twenty wrongs makes a right:

I tried this recently with more success than I expected.  Students completed the probability experiment for homework (recording the sum of two dice rolls a bunch of times), and I collated the class results in a spreadsheet.  After my trick with the coin tosses they knew they wouldn’t get away with making up results, so their tables were genuine and yet not particularly close to expected values.  For a sample of just 36 dice rolls each this is to be expected, but it was really interesting to show them that even their motley collection of not-too-good-looking results, when combined with each other, averaged out to resemble the theoretical distribution very closely.  Again, the power of large samples coming into its own.

I use the spreadsheet above to emphasize that unlikely events not only happen, but happen with surprising predictability for a large enough sample size.  How can Snickers run entire factories, employ staff and spend millions of pounds all on the off-chance that someone chooses their particular chocolate bar on a whim at the checkout?  Because a tiny percentage of a large enough number is still a decent size, and while it may vary a bit, it’s actually surprisingly unlikely to fall too low.  This all starts to sound like Asimov’s ‘psychohistory’, which takes the intriguing idea of predictability for large numbers to whole new levels.  Nevertheless, it’s one of the most powerful ideas of probability, and I think it’s worth highlighting in between the multiplying of fractions and the drawing of tree diagrams.  Incidentally, one of my self-marking homeworks is on the topic of relative frequency:

On a similar theme, I tested a theory with my year 9 class last week on the power of collective guess-work.  Having just shown them how uncannily predictable their combined probability homework results were (however unpredictable each individual result may have been), I told them how the average guess for, say, the weight of a pig or the number of sweets in a jar, has been shown to be better, often, than any one person’s prediction.  They clamoured for proof (in retrospect, possibly just for sweets), so I used a picture I generally reserve for trial and error lessons of a pile of bottles I once counted, and the class average guess for the number of bottles in the pile was within 1.7% of the real total!  I was seriously impressed.

Randomly generate American men: I’ve included links to a few Excel files I use for probability, but it can be really helpful to be able to throw something specific together on the spur of the moment.  So here’s a few Excel formulae you may find useful: =RAND() is the obvious one.  Gives a random number (rectangular distribution) between 0 and 1.  May equal 0 but is always less than 1.  Multiply by it to scale up the range, and add to move the range.  So =5*RAND()+2 gives numbers greater than or equal to 2 but less than 7.  You can even round, but =RANDBETWEEN(1,6) is a simpler way to generate random integers (from 1 to 6 inclusive).  Here’s a clever one for the statistics boffins among you: =NORM.INV(RAND(),0,1) gives a random number normally distributed about the mean of 0 with standard deviation 1.  It uses RAND() as a probability.  Use it to create realistic sample sets like heights or weights.  I have it on good authority that a normal distribution with mean 178cm and standard deviation 8cm describes the heights of American men.  So =NORM.INV(RAND(),178,8) will randomly generate for you an American man.  Well, his height, anyway.  Nifty, no?  For those of you teaching A-level Statistics, the next spreadsheet combines the statistical power of Excel with the actual values provided in the tables in the AQA formula book so you can find not only the correct answers but also the answers your students should be getting.  Includes binomial and normal distributions.

And if you want a nice interactive way to introduce that beautiful bell curve of the normal distribution, check out my GeoGebra version:

False Positive: Conditional probability is set to be a bigger part of the new GCSE, I understand.  The counter-intuitive way that medical testing works makes this a really interesting example of conditional probability.  The question you want to know is “Given that I tested positive, what’s the chance that I’m sick”, and it turns out the biggest factor in determining this probability is the proportion of people who get tested who are actually sick.

Random Walks: My Snail Race activity was about as fast-paced and exciting as it sounds, but at least it gave me the chance to test out a nifty method for generating random numbers on the fly.  Two competitors (who are not cooperating) hold up between 1 and 4 fingers simultaneously.  Add the totals together, and use the remainder when divided by 4 to determine the direction to move next (left, up, right or down).  This is a nice two-dimensional way to visualise randomness (and notice how often you double-back on yourself compared to how often you might have done if you were making it up).

“I beat you, you beat him, he beats me.  Wait… what?”: A probability ideas post would not be complete without at least a mention of the ingenious ‘Grime Dice’ developed by MathsGear and available here: http://mathsgear.co.uk/products/non-transitive-grime-dice .  They are non-transitive, so if you memorize the order correctly this is yet another way you can reliably beat your class at an apparently fair game.  Unless you memorize the order backwards, like I did.  That’s a great way to reliably lose.

Er, that’s not my card: Of course, for every success there’s bound to be a probability experiment that backfires or just plain doesn’t work.  Last lesson I threw 9 tails in 10 tosses while trying to demonstrate how much more likely 4, 5 or 6 was.  I lost £10 to a student last year when he guessed 10 coin tosses in a row.  More recently I attempted – with much skepticism, it must be said – to sway the random choice of a playing card using auto-suggestion.  A subliminal poster campaign was launched a few days prior to our probability lesson, comprised of the following:

Not only did nobody think of the six of diamonds, but only two people in the whole class even had diamonds as their chosen suit.  My posters must have been sub-subliminal.  Sticking with the null hypothesis on this one for the time being, I reckon.

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# Number sense and the value of primes in the classroom

I loved maths at school.  I hated learning my times tables.  The beauty and underlying structure, the connections and patterns, the tricks and simplifications were all lost on me since the teaching method involved writing down every times table question from 1 to 12, in order, over and over again.  Natural numbers are just that – natural.  They grew inescapably from our desire to accurately describe the world around us, and their fundamental properties are also pleasingly grounded in concrete patterns and structures.  By laying out objects in rectangular groupings we can not only calculate but physically experience how numbers can be separated fairly into a number of groups.  Children should learn their tables, but they should develop a sense of the numbers from their inherent structure, not be required to memorize as-yet meaningless lists of facts.  I want my son to be able to work out 14 times 4 as confidently as 7 times 8, and understand that it’s the same as 3.5 times 16 to boot.  The structure and patterns behind numbers are more mysterious than their simple roots might suggest.  Take a look at these patterns and see if you can figure out what they mean:

Each number forms a unique pattern. What determines the complexity and nature of the pattern? Can you deduce the rules?

Some numbers refuse to be broken down nicely into groups.  They resist the urge to be separated beyond the trivial groupings of ‘all together’ or ‘all apart’.  11 sweets won’t share nicely between any group except a group of 11 or a group of 1.  Most normal people might note the anomaly, perhaps try to buy 12 sweets the next time and think no more about it.  Meanwhile mathematicians, in our insatiable desire to look for patterns and rules, try – and, for the most part, gloriously fail – to find an elegant explanation for the distribution of these so-called prime numbers.

Can you see the connection between numbers with the same colour coding?

The study of prime numbers, and number theory in general, is one of the most abstract areas of mathematics.  Until recently, with some clever computer scientists using their very intractability to develop encryption algorithms, there was no real application anywhere in science or technology.  Which makes the topic either pointless or the purest of mathematics depending on your perspective.

As a teacher, I actually hold a position that isn’t quite either of those.  Primes do have specific applications to my field – I use them when making up quadratics to factorise, or fractions problems that will nicely pre-simplify, and they also enable me to do all sorts of mental maths magic on the board without pausing in my explanation (which was what impressed me most at A-level about my teachers).  Here’s a few nifty things you may not have come across yet in your teaching of these topics:

Number of factors from prime decomposition:  By following a straightforward branching method, any number can be separated into its unique product of primes.

From here, it is worth recognising that every factor is simply a combination, or subset, of those primes.  24 is 2 x 2 x 2 x 3, so its factors can have anything from no 2s up to all 3, and either no 3s or one 3.  We can actually count the factors directly from the prime decomposition.  How many 2s? (0, 1, 2 or 3) and how many 3s? (0 or 1) means 4  options followed by 2 options, giving 8 possible combinations (from no 2s and no 3s: 1, up to three 2s and one 3: 24).  While primes themselves may hide their structure fiendishly well, by following this rule we can find patterns involving the number of factors for different types of number.  Any number which is a power of a single prime will have one greater factors than the power (so 2 to the 6 has 7 factors).  Powers of a number composed of two primes (such as 10) will have a square number of factors (10 has 4, 100 has 9, 1000 has 16, etc).  Some numbers are special to us because of our number system (base 10).  Count up the number of 2s and 5s in the prime factorisation of your number, and the smaller of the two numbers will give you the number of zeroes at the end of your number.  Lastly, if you want an alternative explanation to why square numbers are the only ones with an odd number of factors, use the ‘product of one more than each power’ way of counting factors to see that this will only be odd if every power is even.

To investigate these patterns further, use my Factors Investigation:

How does the number of factors link to the prime decomposition?

Recurring decimals: Ever wondered why fractions of powers of 2 (a half, a quarter, etc) look like powers of 5, and vice versa?  As you may suspect, it comes down to the fact that 2 times 5 gives 10, the base of our number system.  It’s quite an elegant way to demonstrate why some fractions give terminating expansions while others are recurring.  To turn an eighth into a fraction whose denominator is a power of 10 would require multiplying top and bottom by 125, and that’s where 0.125 comes from.  Have students use a calculator to identify recurring and terminating decimals for the first few numbers, then look at prime factorisations to see if they can predict which numbers will recur and which terminate:

Linking the prime decomposition with whether a decimal expansion terminates or recurs.

The terminating decimals have denominators which contain no primes other than 2 or 5.  Why?  Base 10, of course.  In base 12 we would get terminating decimals from numbers built from 2s and 3s (so a half, a third, a quarter and a sixth would be 0.6, 0.4, 0.3 and 0.2, although a fifth would now be 0.24972497… – that one took me some time!).  Try this with binary and numbers that would be fine in decimal, like 0.2, become recurring (leading to floating point rounding errors, in case you’re curious how computers can sometimes get 0.1+0.2 wrong).

Modular arithmetic: I’m only just beginning to learn about this, and it’s not really that closely related to what I teach, but if you want to be able to say ‘primes are used in, er, computer security’ with a little more confidence, I recommend brushing up on your modular arithmetic and investigating public key encryption.  To whet your appetite, I can convince you that the last digit of the largest known prime has to be a 1 using nothing very complicated:

How the largest known prime ends, and how we know.

I strongly recommend you carve out some time with or without your classes to investigate prime numbers some more.  Here’s a spreadsheet I’ve created which lists the prime factorisation and factors of numbers, and allows you to quickly and easily examine lists of numbers.  (Thanks to @colinjthomas for writing, implementing and sending me a 5-minute program to factorise the first hundred-thousand numbers all in the time it took my program to work through the first 5 thousand):

Enter any natural number up to 100,000 for its prime factor decomposition and its position relative to nearby primes.

It should be noted that recent Casio calculators have a ‘FACT’ button which allows students to find the prime factorisation of numbers directly (I don’t have this button, so I downloaded an app instead – you never know when you might need to factorise a number in a hurry…)

And lastly, if you haven’t seen datapointed.net’s visualizations of numbers I highly recommend it – a great representation of numbers in terms of their factors:

Primes can only ever be one group, but composite numbers break down in all sorts of cool ways.

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# So you want to be an A-level Mathematician?

Mathematics is a wonderful, terrible, elegant, messy, exciting and tedious subject.  Students considering an A-level (or two) in this subject may rightly be daunted by the work-load, and intimidated by the huge stack of new ideas they are expected to assimilate and regurgitate two years later, but should take care not to get stuck in the rut of ‘what I need to be able to do for the exam’.

Many courses come with a recommended reading list – a mesmerizing heap of relevant literature which, if not exactly essential to your course, will broaden your horizons and develop you further than the course textbooks alone would do.  When a student starts A-level Maths or Further Maths, their ‘suggested purchases’ list consists of a £50 calculator and… um.  Yeah, that ought to do.  Inspiring, no?

The list that follows is deliberately not a recommended reading list.  There are plenty of more qualified reviewers of mathematical literature out there (Cambridge University have something of a reputation for that sort of thing, so check out their recommended reading list if that’s what you’re after.)  My list is a collection of people / websites / channels that I suggest my students follow.  They lean more towards the interesting, recreational and non-examinable, but are all the better for that, since there will be plenty of the must-learn mathematics going on in the classroom.  My motivation for these recommendations is to insure against students losing their love of the subject.  Mathematics in year 12 or 13 (and even more so Further Mathematics) is a very demanding course, and while it is full of interesting and exciting ideas, it is still possible to be overwhelmed and intimidated by it all, and end up losing track of what made you want study it in the first place.  Call it the reverse Tom Sawyer effect, if you will (he turned a chore into a sought-after activity, and if we’re not careful we can turn the privilege of maths education into a chore).  So if you’re a student of maths, or a teacher looking to inspire your A-level & would-be A-level mathematicians, these are a few of the wonderful internet people who inspire me:

Numberphile: Primarily a YouTube channel which specializes in short explanations of interesting mathematics by a whole range of enthusiastic mathematicians including some of my personal favourites, James Grime and Matt Parker.  The mathematics can be quite a high level, but is always presented in an accessible fashion.  There is also such a wide range of subject matter, from number theory to compass construction, picking up on maths in the news, in popular games, or discussing new mathematical proofs in interesting and engaging ways.  You will also get a sense of the development of mathematics through history with anecdotes and insights into famous mathematicians.  Below is one of my favourites – Matt Parker demonstrates how computers perform calculations by building his own out of dominoes:

Vi Hart: Another YouTube channel to follow, Vi gives a wonderfully creative take on the mathematics that students will be encountering as they progress through their A-level course.  The video style alone is a work of art, with hours of scribbling condensed into a few minutes, with a concise and superbly scripted narration to go with it.  She combines music with interesting mathematics in a unique presentation that is a joy to watch.  Her video ‘Reel‘ is probably the most beautiful description of the way we feel about imaginary numbers you will ever encounter.  Here’s another favourite of mine, where she leads you unsuspecting from counting to adding to multiplying and suddenly you find yourself understanding logarithms:

XKCD: ‘A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language’, these comics are worth a look for some light – if geeky – entertainment, but the really clever stuff comes in the What If section, where some really fun questions are answered from a scientific point of view.  The author used to work at NASA, so he really knows his stuff, and the way he presents solutions, along with his intuitive approach to tackling each problem, is superb.  Plus, who doesn’t want to know what would happen if a baseball travelled near the speed of light, or how many BB guns you would need to fire at a freight train to get it to stop?  Sprinkled with amusing illustrations, these are a great way to investigate daft problems.  One of my favourites has to be Train Loop: this question was in response to a Norwegian ad where a train performs a loop-the-loop.  The original ad is here:

Veritasium: This YouTube channel mainly investigates physical phenomena, and yields surprising insights by means of identifying misconceptions.  Essentially, the host will ask a bunch of people a question, identify the common misconceptions that we have about something, and then explain (or get an expert or two to explain, if it’s really tricky) what’s actually going on, such as this one about how we perceive temperature.  Some videos are designed to have more of an interactive feel, where an experiment is carried out, and the audience (us) are given the chance to predict the outcome.  One that will come in handy for getting to grips with the mass vs weight confusion is Misconceptions about falling objects.  But a personal favourite of mine hits a very common area of confusion – is there really no gravity on the International Space Station?

Vsauce: Another Youtube channel that’s not strictly mathematical, but this guy crams so many interesting phenomena and ideas into every video that there’s bound to be a few things to make you think.  The mathematics is less explicitly involved, but it’s definitely there.  One of my favourites is a really clever description (plus visual simulation) of what would happen if the Earth were flat:

Brilliant: After getting a little distracted by all the cool science bits, let’s get back to a bit of maths.  I’ve only recently discovered this website, but I’ve been really impressed.  It’s essentially a bank of multiple choice maths questions, ranging from pre-GCSE to post-A-level, separated into categories and difficulty levels.  Because of the format, it lends itself really well to smart phones, so download the app and fill those spare minutes brushing up on anything from geometry to calculus.  Also includes sections on some of the more mathsy bits of science.

WolframAlpha: An incredibly useful tool for all sorts of calculations.  It works rather like Google’s built-in calculator (which, by the way, can draw graphs for you and all sorts), but is connected to Wolfram’s powerful ‘knowledge engine’, allowing you to integrate functions directly (not just get numerical approximations), work out your binomial expansions, solve equations and much much more.

GeoGebra: This free program has revolutionized the way I teach certain concepts.  It is easy to learn and intuitive to use, and has sufficient built-in capacity to develop all sorts of interesting demonstrations.  Students can download it for free, use an online version or download an app for their tablet.  They can use it as a graphical calculator, drawing graphs (including implicit functions and parametric curves), performing differentiation and integration, investigating shapes, learning matrix transformations, understanding projectile motion, and all sorts of cool stuff.  I’ve made my own short introduction to the program, designed for students to quickly get to grips with the basics.  By searching the uploaded files of other educators on GeoGebraTube, you can build an intuitive understanding of all sorts of hard-to-grasp concepts, as well as have your eyes opened to all sorts of new and interesting mathematics.

Finally, a quick mention of my own website, TheChalkface.net.  It doesn’t quite belong with the links above, but I do upload my teaching and learning materials, and the A-level Maths section is particularly good (in my opinion) for revision resources.  It has links to AQA exam papers (downloadable in bulk instead of one by one), hundreds of worked exam solutions, my Not-Formula Book revision booklets and their further condensed Essentials revision cards, as well as a host of worksheets and activities designed to fit within the A-level syllabus.

The links I’ve listed above are just the beginning – loads of people are doing fantastic work out there inspiring students (and teachers!)  If there are any sites you think should have been on my list, please put them in the comments below – thank you!

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# How the French Revolution made King Henry’s nose obsolete: The metric system

Should students who struggle with numeracy be learning to solve quadratics?  Is rote-learning trigonometry genuinely the best use of our time with every student regardless of ability or aspiration?  I’m not sure.  I am a firm believer in the utility of my subject, and also in the value of learning things that may never be used again.  Moreover, learning for the sake of learning, and curiosity for its own sake is what most often yields the amazing advances that justify our investment in the subject.

I have my own answers to the question “What’s the point of maths?”  In fact, if you’re interested, I even made a leaflet for the more skeptical of my students:

However, this post is about one of the (many) topics that is unquestionably applicable to everyday life.  Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has wanted to keep track of things; to count our herds, weigh our flour, measure our land.  And more recently, compare our smartphone specs, remodel our kitchen or track our puppy’s BMI (is that a thing?)

There is definitely value, I think, in glancing back over the rich tapestry of imperial units.  Too often students take things at face value without question, and it’s worth getting them to ask why we have centimetres: Where did they come from?  Why are they that size?  This is more easily done with the imperial system.  Oudated and outrageous in its complexity, its very confusion speaks of its widespread and disparate usage.  From farmers to tailors, and from sea-farers to road-builders, the applications come through in the units chosen: feet and hands, shackles and cables, rods and chains, furlongs and barley-corns.  The unit chosen is entirely arbitrary – the only value in a given unit is the value people place in it (just like the confidence we have in paper money).  So long as everyone used yards, yards were the logical choice.  Of course, depending on whether you were at sea or on land, ploughing a field or hemming a skirt, there were dozens of popular alternatives to choose from.  I started out the first year 7 lesson of the year with this wonderful video by Matt Parker:

As well as being something of a history lesson, this video – as was its intention, of course – highlights the greatest flaw in the imperial system: it’s a bugger to work with.  The system developed organically, over hundreds – if not thousands – of years, so it resembles a sprawling 18th century London – built up over time by separate groups with little cohesive narrative.  Until the upheaval of the French Revolution gave us the push we needed to make a drastic change, and along came the meticulously planned Milton Keynes of measurement systems.  Taking the most universal thing they could think of as the base unit, they split the circumference of our entire planet into quarters, then broke those quarters into 10 easy pieces.  Each of those was broken down into a million (more manageable) lengths (conveniently roughly equivalent to a yard, thus thumbing their noses at its inventor, Henry I, who is credited with defining it as the distance from his outstretched thumb to the tip of his nose).  Once the metre was established (even the word was audacious: ‘metre’, of course, meaning ‘measure’), the rest followed in a logical base-10 system: millimetres, kilometres, etc.  Of course, their original measurements were a little off (the Earth happens to be 40,075km around, not exactly 40,000km), but, like we said, the choice of unit is not as important as the value we attach to it.

And school children of today don’t know they’re born, with the luxury of only ever having to multiply or divide by 10, 100 or 1000.  The system was designed with ease-of-use in mind.  Having said that, old habits die hard, and it takes a generation or more before people are more comfortable with the new units than with the old.  This worksheet introduces the metric system while highlighting the cultural scenarios when the imperial system is alive and kicking in the UK:

And this one is something of a follow-on, giving details of imperial to metric conversions for students to use throughout:

While our curriculum may be mostly tied up with unit conversion, the skill I am most keen to develop in my students is an intuitive sense of the units they are manipulating.  They should know that their iphone weighs 150g and that there’s a 10m drop from the classroom window (those two facts are not necessarily related…).  In my opinion, fostering a familiarity with units of measurement is one of the best ways a parent can equip their child to confidently use maths in the so-called ‘real world’.  Parents don’t need to love algebra or get all excited about circular motion, but we should all be able to provide opportunities for our children to measure, to estimate, and to budget.  This next one is simply an opportunity for students to find examples of what is measured in which units.  Just how heavy is that car ferry?  How far away is France?  What is the width of a pencil line?

At this stage I try my hardest not to get too hung up on the distinction between weight and mass (see ill-concealed rant / A-level info-sheet).  Students need to develop a ‘feel’ for this stuff first and foremost.  The following match-up activity I enjoy using.  Students (individually or as competing teams) have to first choose the most logical thing to measure (do we want temperature or distance for a high-jumper?), then pick a number that fits the given units.  Truth be told, some are hard to guess, but there’s a lot of mileage (sorry, km-age) in asking students which answers they’re really confident with – they may surprise you.

And this worksheet encourages rough estimation.  Given the number, can you choose the appropriate units?  Is a tin of beans more likely to be 415 grams, kilograms or tonnes?

Some quirk of human nature makes my students 12 times more eager to answer questions when I dole out plastic counters for their efforts.  Usually given out with no explanation or promise of reward, and collected back at the end with no totting up or declaration of a winner.  Competition alone is enough.  This next activity is, therefore, in the form of a quiz.  Put them in teams, and maybe even save it for the end of term so they view it differently to a normal lesson.  This has plenty of scope for curiosity and extra discussion (so read up on it before-hand, or better yet make your own) – students have to guess the big numbers that go with these big things.

Once your students get on to compound measure, test their confidence converting compound units of speed with Speed Conversion, and of course check out my earlier post on density (which packs in a surprising amount, for its size…)

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