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!

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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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 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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Eagle-eyed Whizz Blog readers - what other kind are there - will have noticed the snazzy Whizz Scientific Calculator lurking in the sidebar to the right of the main blog page.

The Whizz Scientific Calculator is as it appears in our Key Stage 3 animated exercises in our Teachers’ Resource and our online Tutoring service; it features power functions, logarithms, trigonometry buttons and fraction conversion and all that jazz. Do your homework, work out your tax, write rude number-words or calculate the budget deficit (though you may need a larger screen for the last one).

Visit the Whizz Calculator Widgetbox page to put the Whizz calculator in your blog, on your website or even in your Facebook page or Google homepage. Click the ‘Get Widget’  button, select where you want to put your own Whizz Calculator, and copy the code as appropriate.

You can also add the Whiz calculator to your iGoogle page instantly with this link.

If you’re struggling with maths homework and it seems nobody can help, why not call the emergency services!

This is transcript and audio from a call four-year-old ‘Johnny’ made to 911 (the US equivalent of 999) when he was struggling with his maths. It’s no wonder he needed help from America’s finest; we wouldn’t expect our students to attempt such subtraction questions until Year 1 (roughly age 6) at least…

This video, and more, available on the Whizz Education YouTube Channel.