The Whizz

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!

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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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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The long summer holidays will soon be upon us. But those endless warm afternoons of childhood may conceal a hidden menace - stupidity (aka ’summer learning loss’).

The Education Guardian last week reported on plans from think-tank The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) to shorten the long summer holidays. IPPR policy wonks have found that:

…children from the poorest backgrounds suffered most with ’summer learning loss’ because they were the least likely to practise reading and writing during the six-week break.

(Is this cat suffering from ’summer learning loss’? Find out after the jump)

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Maths is too geeky, according to a UK research council study reported in the Education Guardian .

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) study showed:

…that students think of mathematicians as old, white, middle-class men who are obsessed with their subject, lack social skills and have no personal life outside maths.

You might be tempted to wonder if this report comes from the university Department for Stating the Bleeding Obvious, but it’s worth pausing for a second and thinking hard about where such attitudes come from, and what effects they have.

(Danica McKellar, full-time actress, part-time published mathematician, author of ‘Math Doesn’t Suck’ (trans: ‘Maths Isn’t That Bad, Honestly’), and - if the ESRC study is anything to go by - the exception that proves the rule)

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The testing system in England is in danger of damaging children’s education, according to a recent report from the Children, Schools and Families parliamentary select committee.

As the BBC reports, 25 million papers are taken in an annual orgy of testing that, the committee argues, risks placing too much emphasis on too few types of test and on teaching to the test.

More damningly, the report states:

…that the single-level tests’ “one-way ratchet” system will lead to an “artificial” improvement in results, in which pupils will be “certified to have achieved a level of knowledge and understanding which they do not in truth possess”.

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The parents’ evening is going out of fashion, according to an article in The Guardian, yesterday.

Polly Curtis reports:

Rather than an evening a term queueing for a five-minute chat with teachers, parents want more frequent access, or to monitor their children’s progress online, according to research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The DCSF report, summarised here, suggests that parents’ working lives are getting in the way of engagement with their students’ education, especially homework.

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Abstract concepts are better for teaching maths than real-world ones, according to a study reported on in a recent New York Times article. What does this mean for teaching maths and what does it mean for Maths-Whizz?

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‘The Whizz’ blog has managed to get free access to the huge online Encyclopedia Britannica!

The service, called Britannica WebShare, enables us at Whizz, Maths-Whizz customers, and Whizz blog readers alike to access full Encyclopedia Britannica articles that we link to, on just about any subject, from Shakespeare (who died on this day) to the Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal).

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Maths teachers are always thinking of new ways to teach the subject. We’re constantly surprised at the ingenuity and variety of styles and methods that teachers use; but teaching maths in French - at a Scottish school - is new to us.

Maths genius Pierre de Fermat - coming soon… from Scotland?

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