Quiz: How good is your mathematical sense of humour?

1729 and Futurama

BBC article: why is the number 1729 hidden in Futurama episodes? (Simon Singh)

Factors, multiples and primes: online calculators

A prime factorisation calculator:

http://www.mathwarehouse.com/arithmetic/numbers/prime-number/prime-factorization-calculator.php

Murderous Maths has an HCF/LCM calculator:

http://www.murderousmaths.co.uk/books/bkmm4xlc.htm

Visual patterns

Via Fawn Nguyen:

http://visualpatterns.org/

- a library of patterns, with some great questions.

See also this thread on NCETM (the UK one): reading this (especially post 20) has inspired some of my favourite lessons on sequences.

Graphing stories

http://graphingstories.com/

Give out graphing handout (linked at top left of page).

15 seconds of video footage, looking at the change in a variable over time, repeated at half speed. Pause for pupils to draw the graph, then play for the answer.

Well worth using!

Maths Busking

Maths Busking is, well, busking with maths: variety of mathematical delights to amuse and entertain passersby, performed by a growing number of volunteers. Nifty routines include Mind Reading and the Emergency Pentagon (ideal for cutting a pie, pizza or cake into five equal pieces).

What are the chances?

Tomorrow I am going to start off a probability topic by playing "Higher or Lower?", perhaps even picking names from a hat or using a random name generator. A card from a shuffled pack is turned over, and the participant has to work his or her way through the next 6-10 cards, deciding whether each card is going to be higher or lower than the one before. (Always best to set ground rules such as the worth of picture cards and whether aces are high or low before starting...) If the participant gets to the end correctly, she wins; if not, the person running the game wins.

A computer version can be found at Woodlands Junior School.

Stacking Cups to Form Linear Equations

Originally posted here by Dan Meyer; Fawn Nguyen writes up her lesson.

xkcd: Log Scale

How tall is Mr S?

Estimation 180

A daily estimation challenge, with the challenges building over time.

Estimation: the eyeballing game

http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/

Hypothesis testing: practical activities

Can your pupils tell the difference between own-brand and branded products? Will they improve their time taken to complete a maze with practice?

Lots of ideas from CIMT and Nuffield.

Quick response codes

Make a treasure hunt, provide a link to extension work, and more using QR codes:

http://teachery.net/how-teachers-can-use-qr-codes/

Shared by one of my pupils - a song about finding the mean, mode and median of a set of data.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2obAPwfqk

TED-Ed

As well as the brilliant TED talks, you can now access TED-Ed: short animated lessons, with supplementary material, on a variety of topics.

Super-fast addition

Ask the class for two numbers, for example 3 and 5, and use these to generate 10 terms of a Fibonacci-esque sequence:

3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233

Ask someone to add these up with a calculator while you add them up in your head.

What is the quick way to do this?

Folding polygons from A sized paper

From Motivate:

Be a paper mathemagician!

Multiplication tricks, part one of many

Squaring a two-digit number ending in 5

The last two digits will always be 25.

To get the first digit(s), take the tens digit of your number and multiply it by the next integer.

Example: 45²

To get the first two digits, multiply 4 by 5 (the next consecutive integer) to get 20. Last two digits are 25. So

45² = 2025.

Dubious proofs, part two

Theorem:

A cat has nine tails.

Proof:

No cat has eight tails. A cat has one tail more than no cat.
Therefore, a cat has nine tails.
(from Math Humor)

Magic mindreading maths tricks

A brilliant way to practise numeracy and algebra!

"I think of a number... add 5... double the result, subtract three.. now take away twice the number you first thought of... what have you got?"

See all over the internet (!) and http://www.iwbmathstraining.co.uk/index.php?option=com_2j_tabs&Itemid=24 (A9: Number Magic)