…woof woof!
Robo-Dog available in the Maths-Whizz Shop!
Feed him, play with him, watch him transform, and watch him sleep - it’s RoboDog!
RoboDog is the latest pet in the Maths-Whizz Bedroom. Get busy with our maths tutor and save up your hard-earned credits to add our shiny mechanical canine to your personal maths tutoring space.
Don’t forget to stock up on nuts and bolts - he’s on a stainless steel-only diet…
Live student reports for parents and teachers have been key to the success of Maths-Whizz Tutoring.
Since we launched Maths-Whizz Tutoring four years ago, we’ve been providing ‘live updates’ to parents and teachers on the progress of their students’ Maths-Ability.
It’s something of a no-brainer: when Parents and Teachers are able to access the same student progress information, it strengthens communication between the school and home. This produces purposeful and positive understanding of every child’s current ability - strengths and weaknesses.
This Friday, BECTA will recognise the benefits of live reporting in a conference for Primary School Head Teachers and Leaders: Engaging parents through online reporting - London 26 February 2010.
Educating schools on the importance of a transparent relationship between Students, teachers and the home environment is at the core of Maths-Whizz beliefs and is applied through our Best Practice Methods.
With Head teachers now taking the step towards embracing these methods across the country, we can expect only a positive step toward all students reaching there full potential through ICT and Maths-Whizz.
The excellent Steven Strogatz, writing a series of online-only articles about maths for the New York Times, has just posted his latest piece. It’s about that hairy beast of mathematics - division!
Taking a broad and accessible view of the problems of fractional quantities and how much we struggle with them, Strogatz weaves in the Daniel Day Lewis film My Left Foot and the awesome mind-bendingly-bad maths of a customer service rep.
The customer “V” is querying an error in which he was charged 0.002 dollars per kilobyte of web use, rather than the correct 0.002 cents:
V: “Do you recognize that there’s a difference between one dollar and one cent?”
A: “Definitely.”
V: “Do you recognize there’s a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?”
A: “Definitely.”
V: “Then, do you therefore recognize there’s a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?”
A: “No.”
V: “No?”
A: “I mean there’s … there’s no .002 dollars.”
As Strogatz points out, and as the God of Whizz knows all too well, fractional maths concepts are often deeply unnatural for a brain that seems naturally to prefer wholeness, roundness, solidity.
When our internal concept of a mathematical value only goes so far in describing something, we stop and shrug our shoulders.
A few moments later Andrea says, “Obviously a dollar is 1.00, right? So what would .002 dollars look like? I’ve never heard of .002 dollars… It’s just not a full cent.”
The challenge of converting between dollars and cents is only part of the problem for Andrea. The real barrier is her inability to envision a portion of either.
This difficulty conceptualising fractional quantities and how they interact was shown in the first episode of the Channel 4 doc The Kids Don’t Count, in which we saw how children and adults struggle with dividing one fractional quantity by another.
I recommend you read the article in full (plus any others in his online series). Strogatz concludes by noting that irrational numbers - weird numbers that cannot be expressed as a ratio (or fraction) of any whole numbers - are far more common than those lovely rational numbers that we know, love, and think the world is made up of, like 1, 5, 3/4, and 0.333…
If that doesn’t pique your interest, you clearly need to spend more time with the God of Whizz!
I’ve already twittered about this, but just a reminder that the much-discussed Channel 4 Dispatches programme The Kids Don’t Count has a minisite with a nice maths quiz.
Catch the twitterati talking about it with the #Dispatches hashtag, or try the test for yourself and see if you score 14/14.
As revealed in the Dispatches programme, only ONE of the 150 primary teachers who took a test like this got every question right. Which makes you wonder if they shouldn’t be taking a little primary maths tutoring before they take a class of future engineers, scientists and accountants.
Much fuss has been made of this, and the apparently parlous state our primary teaching is in. The GoW is inclined to be a little more generous, but only a little, because as he’s stated in the past, a love (if not innate aptitude) for the subject should come first, and an emphasis on testing second.
We’ll probably heap opprobium on the teachers, when we should be focussing on policy which chases test results, trains for pedagogy, and produces a blind willingness to cleave to a national curriculum which sometimes drains all the interest out of a subject.
