If you (or your Maths-Whizzer) have not yet logged in to your Maths tutoring account, do so now, and get some colourful Easter Egg bedroom wallpaper. Maths-Whizz is perfect for helping with ‘holiday learning loss’, in which subjects learned in term time are gradually forgotten over the sunny downtime. This Easter break may be no exception.

In the meantime at Whizz Towers in London we’re enjoying the glorious spring sunshine and hope wherever you are that you have a happy Easter, and happy Maths-Whizzing…

Alison Gopnik, writing at Slate.com, comments on the increasing tendency to teach pre-school children, rather than allow them to play. She suggests that this approach, at least for the youngest children, might be stifling not just creativity, but the ability to learn, and she cites two new papers that draw from computer science to prove her point.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It’s this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place.

The key seems to be the way children learn about learning. A child will learn about the teaching method in order to understand better how to learn. Two recent papers in the journal Cognition explore the nature of that process by giving groups of children toys with hidden features and starting them off with either an exploratory approach or a taught one.

The understanding is that a purely demonstrative, instructional teacher implicitly conveys the understanding that the student can only learn by doing as she does, following her instruction. Whereas, a teacher who explores with the student (or even no teacher at all) brings with her the belief that experiment and investigation are just as useful as instruction, and that not all knowledge is directed.

Both research groups found that the less-directed students discovered more, and explored for longer. The differences between being instructed and encouraged to explore in both studies were subtle – a teacher might demonstrate an action (or set of actions) that produces a result in a toy and tell children to do likewise, or the teacher might explore the toy to produce an action as if by accident and encourage the children to see what they can find for themselves.

The research Gopnik refers to is new, and devoted to pre-school subjects, so it may be inappropriate to extrapolate this to primary age children. But these findings point to what she describes as a common intuition amongst teachers: that play can be just as powerful a learning tool as instruction if not, at least for the youngest, more so.

So what, if any, conclusions can we draw for the primary and early secondary children who use our online maths tutor Maths-Whizz? The first might be that there is such a thing as too young to study – we tend to discourage parents who want to use Maths-Whizz for their more advanced four year olds.

Second, we built into our maths lessons an implicit understanding of a child’s learning style at different ages. Earlier lessons at ages five and six are more exploratory and playful, and are devoted to the concepts that underpin maths rather than the more ‘math-y’ material in ages seven and up.

Finally, our recommended usage patterns reflect the need for younger children to have a more varied and undirected experience, away from a computer.

Gopnik echoes indirectly the call for creativity in education, given memorably by Sir Ken Robinson at a TED talk some years ago:

…it’s more important than ever to give children’s remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

Maths-Whizz, as numerous awards, hundreds of testimonials, and tens of thousands of online users prove, is a fabulous and enjoyable tool for building numeracy and boosting confidence in maths.

But we know there is always room for play in maths learning and we encourage students to step away from their online tutor now and then. So, how can you encourage your Maths-Whizzers to make the most of their creative instincts? Without second-guessing the results of future research in this field, here’s an informal selection of ideas:

• Explore maths concepts with the Whizz Tools Board (accessible from the bedroom). Play with cards, dice, counters, shapes, number grids and number ‘machines’.
• Ask your child to teach you. This is a great way to encourage students to marshal their knowledge and creatively convey what they know.
• Find maths in the real world. Look for shapes and angles in the house, think about how to estimate the number of leaves on a tree, and make your own graphs and charts.
• Tell stories with maths. Imagine you’re a number or a shape, and describe your day!

With Maths-Whizz, a little play can go a long way!

Whizz Prof loves numbers and loves to share this love with anyone and everyone! What better day to do so than on Valentine’s Day, a day when symmetrical hearts are decorated, flowers (remember Fibonacci?) are given by the dozen, and Valentines cards are sorted. And at the end of the day, we can count all the ways we love thee…

1. Exchanging approximately 1 Billion Valentine’s Day Cards worldwide (according to the U.S Greeting Card Association).
2. More than 650 million Valentines will be exchanged by children ages 6 to 10 with teachers, classmates and family members.
3. Out of all Valentine’s exchanged teachers will receive the most Valentine’s Day cards, followed by children, mothers, wives, and then, sweethearts.
4. 35 million heart shaped boxes of chocolate will be sold for Valentine’s Day.

Whizz Prof’s love of Maths was inspired by all the ways Maths is used in everyday life and how it makes solving complex problems a little easier.

Your home and classrooms may have a fair share of these hearts, flowers, cards and candies, so why not use Valentine’s Day to inspire the love of Maths in your children and students? Estimate the number of sweets in a jar, compare the number of cards (or chocolates) sold on Valentine’s Day compared to other holidays, or use symmetrical hearts to build a number line.
You might help start a love that lasts a lifetime!

The Nerd Rises - Alex Bellos and Matt Parker

Writing about Ed Miliband’s recent admission that he was a bit of a nerd, Parker gives succour to those who have been teased for their geeky interests and ambitions at school.

I’ve taught maths in inner London comprehensives and they are full of kids having a rough time who will undoubtedly succeed in the rest of their life. I remember looking at the members of the maths club and thinking “you’ve just got to make it through these few years and then you’ll be all right”.

At Maths-Whizz we celebrate the nerd, the geek, the unashamed lover of the science of patterns. We know (and we’ve often pointed out in this blog) just how useful a love of maths can be.

As Parker notes, the geeky, maths-loving founders of Google are two of the world’s richest people (never mind the equally geeky Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg). For me, that’s no so important as the fact that their love of numbers and the so-called ‘nerdy’ subjects has opened whole worlds for them, and us, to explore.

Ben Goldacre, a self-confessed geek about science, medicine, and statistics uses his inner nerd for good – exposing bad science everywhere, often just through careful use of maths.

Chris Addison uses his nerdy side to make us laugh, and then think. Brian Cox uses his love of science (and, admittedly, his boyish good looks) to help us understand, and marvel at, the universe.

Parker, Goldacre, and Addison are some of the stars of 2011′s wonderful Geek Calendar – a picture celebration of the awkward squad made good – Aleks Krotoski, Alex Bellos, and more… even Jonathan Ross.

Any child who wants to be better at maths but thinks it’s not ‘cool’ should be reassured that they will join an illustrious group whose number skills and all-round nerdiness have taken them places others can only dream about. Whether they’re already Maths-Whizzers, or just want to be, we welcome them all.

So, inspired by Parker’s remarks, we should proclaim:

Blessed are the nerds, for they shall inherit the Earth.

[via The Guardian's Comment is Free and The Geek Calendar]

Get started with our very own seasonal maths games, quizzes, and interactive toys to keep you busy through the frosty Advent.

The Whizz Winter Adventure will be available until 6th January.

Make Your Own Snowman!

If you’ve logged into your maths tutoring account since yesterday, you’ll have noticed The Whizz Winter Adventure in the student bedroom.

Whizzers earn Winter Adventure stars for passing maths lessons. They can spend those stars on our interactive games and quizzes. But Maths-Whizzers can build their own snowman straight away!

The God of Whizz has made his own rather smart-looking snowman (above), but he’s even more excited about our forthcoming feature – the WhizzMe avatar builder!

WhizzMe - WhizzYou?

WhizzMes are coming soon. Every Whizzer will soon be able to create their own avatar – an electronic likeness – with hairstyles, accessories, fancy outfits, and goofy faces.

The Maths-Whizz Team has already made some WhizzMes, which you can check them out on the Whizz Education Our People page.

Watch this space for news about WhizzMe, and get busy with your Winter Adventure games!

As with so much in educational theory it seems common sense, but it is nevertheless still worth investigating; namely, whether parents who talk about maths and numbers raise children with more advanced maths skills.

And this seems to be the case, according to research from the University of Chicago.

The researchers found that…

…children whose parents talked more about numbers were much more likely to understand the cardinal number principle — which states that the size of a set of objects is determined by the last number reached when counting the set.

It seems the difference between the children whose parents used few number words and those whose parents used many can be demonstrated simply by asking the child to to point to a set whose size matches a given number.

This is a useful indicator of maths ability because of the way it tests a child’s ability to abstract numbers, rather than simply count up:

Parents often point to objects and say there are three blocks on the floor, for instance. Children can repeat a string of numbers from an early age, but saying “one, two, three” is not the same as actually knowing that the words relate to set size, which is an abstraction.

So the take-home message seems to be, simply, talk about numbers more and your child will learn crucial numerical abstraction skills.

We needn’t add that a love and understanding for maths is a vital skill at any age, and in any walk of life, which is why we think Maths-Whizz Tutoring is a pretty nifty thing.

[via OneIndia news]

Maths-Whizzers can get Percy Pumpkin, Geary the Ghost, Bonnie Bandage, and Bones McCreeky to adorn their bedroom for only 30 credits a pop.

Maths-Whizz Halloween 2010

Maths-Whizzers can decorate their Whizz online maths tutoring bedrooms for one week only!

But as it’s all in a good cause – raising money for the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) – I suggest you watch, enjoy, and check out the charity’s good work.

The video was made at Surrey’s Amesbury School, with the help of students, teachers, and parents.
Good show!

5...4...3...2...1.. Lift off!

Check out a gallery of this geektastic device (click the picture above), or watch one of the design team explain how the Lego Space Shuttle is put together, below.

[via Gizmodo]

Rather than serve only to be hooked, sliced, or shanked into the near distance, chased by a volley of insults, hundreds of red and blue golf balls have been put towards a magnificent three-dimensional Sierpinski Triangle (or tetrahedron, in this instance).

A use for golf balls - maths fractal pyramid

To those otherwise unversed in Sierpinski’s Triangle (also known as a ‘gasket’), it’s a beautifully elegant fractal.

See how successively small triangular ‘subtractions’ from the main triangle produce a lovely, almost threadlike, fractal pattern. The rules for creating this are simple, and can be repeated ad infinitum.

Sierpinski Triangle (Wikimedia)

(Wikipedia)

You don’t even have to start with a triangle to end up with a triangular-shaped Sierpinski fractal. Try it!

Or, better, try the ‘Chaos Game‘, an exotic-sounding name for something you can play with just pencil, paper, ruler, and die:

(Wikipedia)

[Via Make Blog]