This show was launched in St Gerald’s College Castlebar during Maths Week in Oct 2013 and is now available to schools.

To find out more visit our Probability Workshop Page

Today’s math curriculum is teaching students to expect — and excel at — paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. In his talk, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think. (Filmed at TEDxNYED.)

Battleship Maths is a game where students will use trigonometry, co-ordinate geometry and physics to destroy the opponents ships. Battleship Maths has been accepted for the RDS Science Live Lecture Series and will be launched for Science Week 2011.

There will be two fleets of battleships, the science fleet and maths fleet. The names of the battleships will be named after famous scientists and mathematicians e.g. LE Boyle, LE Hamilton. The battleships will work together to destroy the other fleet.

The room will be laid out in two grids with a low screen between the grids. The battleships will be represented by a large bucket that will serve as a target, it needs to be deep to stop the ping pong balls bouncing out. Each battleship team will have a launcher and two theodolites (to measure angles). Students will not be able to see the opponent battleships directly but there will be a tall flag in each battleship which teams can use to measure angles.

Students will work in teams of six, two will deal with the launcher, one angle and one force, two will measure distance to target by measuring angles and using maths to determine distance. The other team members will decide strategy such as the speed/direction of the battleship and talking to the fleet.

The students will build a projectile launcher and then calibrate it to determine the launch speed of the projectile in this case a ping pong ball. The launcher will use a simple elastic band launch system. Once the students have built and calibrated their launcher they must find the best angle and speed to hit a target area.

The second part is to understand how to determine the distance to the target. This is accomplished by two team members one standing at the location of the battleship and one standing at the edge of the grid. They can measure the distance between them off the grid and then they both measure the angle between them and the opponent flag. Once the two angles and the distance between them are found the distance to target can be calculated by using trigonometry.

The game will have several rounds and the game will end if one fleet is destroyed or the time runs out, in this case the fleet with the most intact battleships will win.

Our country’s plummeting aptitude with numbers not only permeates our school system right up to university level, but also is apparent in Government circles. Last week’s Budget could be seen as a consequence of a government with a history of being either unable or unwilling to do some basic arithmetic.

Maybe it’s time for all of our school maths textbooks to have their examples updated. Instead of problems involving euro and cent, we’ll have ones involving billions of euro. Problems like: “What’s the compound interest on €85bn over seven-and-a-half years at 5.83 per cent interest?” Or how about: “Brian buys a bank for €1bn and sells it for 6 cent. Calculate the percentage loss.”

Last February, the Engineers Ireland Report on mathematics education at second level identified a trend over the last 10 years towards learning things off by heart as being at the root of our deteriorating maths standards. “Engineers Ireland is concerned at the extent to which ‘rote learning’ is a teaching mechanism at second level for mathematical subjects rather than ‘learning by understanding’.”

As a maths teacher, I subscribe to the credo that if you don’t understand it, don’t bother learning it. Or at least find someone to try to explain it to you first before committing it to memory.

I’ve been fortunate in having had a succession of brilliant maths teachers, none more so than Dr Sara McMurry, whom I encountered during my physics degree in Trinity. Sara taught me most of the “difficult” maths-heavy courses such as quantum mechanics. She has the rare ability of being able to effortlessly carve through mathematical jungles, rendering them comprehensible to the diligent student.

Her latest textbook, Maths as a Language, has just been launched. Dr McMurry was prompted to write Maths as a Language after her increasingly frustrating experience of trying to teach surprisingly basic concepts to aspiring first-year physicists. Sara recognised a need for a book that explains simple, yet crucial, maths concepts that have been neglected, buried or mishandled by the secondary school system.

Read the full article on http://www.independent.ie

WHAT HAVE the bubbles in a can of draught Guinness, acid etchings on crystal glass, commercial chicken rearing and telephone conference voice quality got in common?

They are all areas where applied mathematics can offer solutions in terms of process and efficiency improvements and thanks to the work of the Science Foundation Ireland funded Macsi (Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry), these real-world issues and many more besides are being addressed in Ireland.

Based in the University of Limerick, Macsi encompasses a network of applied mathematicians working across the country in UCC, NUIG, DIT, UCD, DCU and TCD and aims to develop a coherent strategy for a mathematical solution of problems which arise in science, engineering and industry in Ireland.

Read the full article in The Irish Times

The report of an expert group – seen by The Irish Times – fails to agree on the introduction of bonus points for maths. It does acknowledge Leaving Cert maths at higher level has a heavier workload than other subjects.

The expert group wants colleges to examine a new plan where maths must be among the six Leaving Cert subjects used by students to calculate their CAO points.

This, it says, would reduce the tendency for students to use maths as a “spare subject”. Alternatively, it says colleges should widen the scope of the points system to include seven subjects – one of which must be maths.

From an Irish Times article by SEÁN FLYNN, Education Editor Tues 8th Jun

The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.

He wrote dozens of books about science, math and pseudoscience, including books aimed at children and teens. Among his most famous titles is “The Annotated Alice,” in which he lifted the lid of Lewis Carroll’s classic fantasies “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” to reveal a hidden tapestry of word games and literary references.