The Whizz

Our 2008 summer activity is packed with features to keep kids active over the break - find out how here.

With the Professor Adventures nearly upon us you might want to know how to get the best out of our 2008 summer activity. If the British weather carries on in its current rainy vein, our UK users may find more reason to help the Prof. escape his jungle predicament! The Professor will need saving whether it’s rainstorms, heatwave, or even chilly winter (for our southern hemisphere Whizzers).

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After the huge success of our first survey about Maths and Maths-Whizz in the student bedroom we decided to release a second survey that focuses only on your child’s attitude to Maths.

If your child hasn’t answered the Maths section in our previous survey yet please tell them to give their opinion! They can access the survey through the bedroom notice board and enter the the draw to win a FREE virtual hamster for their play area.

Of course this pet comes with a cage and wheel but it has to be fed regularly with food from the Whizz shop.

By the way, more than 70% of kids who answered our previous survey thought that Maths-Whizz pets are fun!

We had some terrible news on Monday here at Whizz Education. Tom Rawlins, one of our former Flash developers, died unexpectedly last week.

Tom was a decent, warm, and enthusiastic man; a pleasure to work with. Whilst with Whizz Education he produced a number of our animated flash exercises and exam-style tests, and drew some of our best-known characters.

Here’s just a selection of the work Tom did for Whizz Education. Thousands of children have enjoyed his colourful, witty animations and we hope thousands more will.

Whizz Education expresses its sincere condolences to Tom’s family and friends.

 If you wish to pass on your thoughts about Tom’s death, you can visit and join the Facebook group set up in his honour, titled ‘In memory of Tom Rawlins - our best friend, son and brother!’

Who would have thought legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson would inspire a talented young woman to pursue a career in maths?

Prominent mathematician Moon Duchin, profiled yesterday in the Scientific American in a ‘where-are-they-now’ feature, reveals what inspired her to study maths.

“I wanted to be a mathematician since I was 7,” she says. She was fascinated at the time by a book on Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in baseball, and so “I wanted to blaze a trail as a woman in math—once I decided I probably couldn’t be a baseball player,”

 [Top Mathematician Moon Duchin, inspired to excel in maths by Jackie Robinson]

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Want to learn your number bonds* and get some exercise?

Try Maths-Twister! In this video, a teacher demonstrates a useful classroom game to help students practise their number facts and mental arithmetic by playing a variation on the classic game ‘Twister’.

Read on for our take on the ‘Maths-Twister’ recipe, or watch the video on the BBC’s new ‘Backpage’ website where - as they put it - ”parents of primary school kids share their top video tips about helping with homework.”

Many of the homework hints give physical ways of learning subjects, which can be handy if you’re desperate to enjoy the sunshine. We recommend our home students use Maths-Whizz for between 60 and 90 minutes a week, which gives lots of time for exploring maths in the real world - give it a try!

(* number pairs that total a given amount)

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The adventurous academic with a funny hat is back!

He’s exploring central American jungles, learning about ancient cultures and bringing his young sidekicks along for the ride.

…no, not him, The Professor!

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Stop the press: News Report Shows Maths is Useful. Bit of a no-brainer, that one, but not everyone would appreciate just how useful maths and physical science skills are to one industry in particular - computer gaming.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones reports from the north-east of England on the state of the UK’s computer gaming industry and the dearth of programmers with the relevant academic background to make truly great computer games.

Star-Wars! (maths-haters need not apply)

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Math-Whizz has made an appearance in the US on local TV in Seattle, Washington state. King5’s Jane McCarthy looked at the successful integration of Math-Whizz into the Everett School District curriculum. Click here to watch the clip and read the accompanying story.

The segment, shown Friday 13th on King5’s morning show, focussed on the usefulness of the service for staving off ’summer learning loss’ (discussed on our blog here):

“Since using the program, Everett teachers have seen some students gain a year of math knowledge in just three months.

“And with summer approaching, they don’t want all that knowledge to slip away. Studies show that summer break isn’t always good for the brain because students can lose months of knowledge.”

Mary-Anne Stine, Everett School District’s Curriculum Director, pointed out that “[students] lose up to two or three months and struggling students even more,” over the summer break.

It seems a number of parents and teachers had the same concerns in mind when they visited our US site and subscribed to Math-Whizz following King5’s report - we’ve had a phenomenal response and hope it will continue!

If you are a teacher or a parent in the US interested in Math-Whizz online tutoring, email Ben Keogh at ben.keogh@whizzeducation.com.

It’s not as if mathematicians needed proof that theirs was the purest science, but this cartoon merely serves to reinforce the fact, though sociologists and psychologists may find themselves disagreeing…

Maths is vital for young people. Without maths students lose out educationally and, later, professionally.

If we didn’t believe this fervently, we wouldn’t have embarked on producing Maths-Whizz in the first place. As it turns out, lots of parents and teachers (and even students!) agree with us. It now seems the UK independent think-tank Reform is equally enthusiastic about learning maths, but they have come at it from a different angle.

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