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!

The new government has pledged to reduce the UK’s deficit by £6bn in the short term, with further savings to follow. This amount is relatively trivial in relation to the size of the deficit, but seen by some as an important first step.

1.3% of that six billion will – according to today’s news – be Becta-shaped (page 3 in the PDF linked above). The Department for Children, Schools, and Families has already changed to the more Ronseal Department for Education.

We’re still figuring out exactly what the demise of Becta means for us at Whizz, but with the organisation’s (or ‘quango’s’) remit to increase awareness and uptake of educational technology in state schools, there may be some negative effects.

Despite this, its our users and our staff who do the most work to spread the word about Maths-Whizz, and so the appearance or disappearance of government-funded bodies we hope will not affect our fortunes too greatly…

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]

If the God of Whizz was of an uncharitable turn of mind he might suggest that the world of finance has recently honoured mathematical accuracy more in the breach than in the observance.

In this vein, the Financial Times’ Gillian Tett suggests that mathematicians must get out of their ivory towers to restore credibility to the idea of ‘financial mathematics’, whose reputation the Credit Crunch and international financial crises have done so much to sully.

As Gillian Tett suggests:

What really damaged the financial system in recent years was not so much “maths” or “economics”; instead the crucial problem was bad maths (and economics) that was used and abused. Now, more than ever, mathematicians need to get out of their ivory towers or back offices and state that loudly, not just for their sake, but for economists. And, of course, those bankers.

The God of Whizz agrees, and humbly suggests a course of primary maths tutoring for the wizards who did all that financial abusing.

Tim Muffett of BBC Breakfast interviewed students and teachers at north London’s Anson Primary School, which has a novel solution to the problem – teach the parents!

Teachers at Anson School have produced short video snippets outlining key principles that parents can watch with their offspring and so become a constructive part of the homework process.

The idea that Anson Primary School is teaching the wrong people is wide of the mark. As we know well at Maths-Whizz – the most engaged and motivated students have engaged and motivated parents.

A child whose mother enjoys a subject, or is confidently able to assist him with homework, will be more inclined to see value in the subject, to do well at school, and to ask for constructive help.

This is something we’ve been fostering with Maths-Whizz for some time.

The circle of learning with Maths-Whizz

Our home and schools maths tutoring services promote communication between parents, teachers, and students – parents experience our animated tutor with their children, teachers discuss student reports with parents, and kids tend to talk to one another about toys, pets, and our Challenge feature.

[BBC News]

Maths-Whizz in Birmingham!

The God of Whizz needs a slap on the wrist. Whizz went to Birmingham’s NEC at the beginning of the month to show off Maths-Whizz to thousands of teachers and administrators who attended the Education Show 2010 and here, belatedly, is a brief round-up of the proceedings.

Whizz was shortlisted in two categories for the Education Show Awards (ERA Awards) – Supplier of the Year and Exporter of the Year. The show was another great opportunity to mix it amongst teachers and administrators who know and love Maths-Whizz, and those have yet to see the light (for shame!).

To correct the latter, Customer Service manager Natalie M, Product Manager Natalie S, and Sales Wizard Liam showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to spread the word. The Nats had already done sterling work organising our presence at the show and managing our award entries.

Liam, Nat, and Nat!

Read on…!

Whizz Education was exhibiting at the ‘BETT Boulevard‘, a showcase of BETT-show veterans at its Birmingham equivalent, and our corner stand was well-placed to bring in the punters.

Anecdotal feedback from the Birmingham show so far is extremely positive –
visitors were motivated to hear about what we had to offer, more oriented towards education (rather than business, as we found at BETT) and happy to chat about Maths-Whizz after the show.

To illustrate the point, here’s Liam in his element – surrounded by future fans of online maths tutoring.

He does requests...

...see!

Towards the end of the show the Nats got into their glad rags and headed to the awards ceremony.

Look! It's Whizz!

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.

A test administered by researchers for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme found that:

Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.

As The Telegraph points out, ‘The material covered in the Dispatches test is contained in the primary national curriculum…’. And this chimes, rather sadly, with our long-held assertion that most adults have a maths age of 10 or 11. This is late Key Stage 2 – primary – maths, never mind GCSE.

In itself that might be worrying, but that we only ask a C-grade maths GCSE of new Primary school teachers implies that pedagogy and method is more important than knowledge and the confidence that comes from skill.

The God of Maths is a firm believer in the idea that you don’t have to know everything to teach excellently. Just as a good manager should always hope that he promotes his subordinates’ skills above his, a teacher should hope that his charges eventually over-take him. He just has to light the fire.

Despite this, something you cannot fake or rationalise away is a basic confidence and competence in a subject, and if significant numbers of primary teachers really are failing questions like these below, we ought to worry:

• 1.4 ÷ 0.1
• 2.1% of 400
• ABCDE is a pentagon. Name all its diagonals
• 7/16 + 3/4
• The mean height of a group of 4 people is 2 metres. One more person joins the group and then the mean height is 1.9 metres. What is the height of the new person?

Whizz Education will be exhibiting at stand S8E (floorplan) from the 4th-6th March. The fair Natalies will be on hand to guide visitors through the delights of Maths-Whizz Tutoring and Teachers’ Resource tools, fresh from our awards shortlisting at BETT 2010.

To get a sense of what we’ll be up to, you can check out our Whizz Education exhibitor page or stroll down the ‘Education Show BETT Boulevard‘.

If you’re not sure what The ‘BETT Boulevard’ is (and I wasn’t), the AV Interactive blog helpfully explains:

A selection of exhibitors from the BETT show have been chosen to showcase their products at the Education Show 2010, which runs from 4-6 March at the NEC, Birmingham.
Due to growth in exhibitor demand, BETT Boulevard has been expanded and is now located in the For Your School area. Some of the exhibitors featured in BETT Boulevard include NumberGym Software Rentnote, Whizz Education, Rapid English Consultants and Spysure.

The Education Show 2010 is free to attend and is the UK’s largest exhibition of educational resources, regularly attracting over 15,000 visitors.

UPDATE: Read our belated report on the Birmingham Education Show 2010.

(Raising standards in maths - PIR Education)

Some great coverage of our efforts to boost maths standards in schools and home:

Maths-Whizz, which first appeared at BETT in 2006, returns this year with the latest generation of its animated maths teaching tools. The company’s method is to make services that work simply to raise standards in maths, regardless of the classroom environment, the student’s year group or the prevailing new vs. old maths agenda. For this, Maths-Whizz won a BETT award in 2006 and has since been adopted in domestic and schools markets as diverse as Mumbai, Seattle and Tunbridge Wells. The company has further boosted its credentials with two BETT award nominations this year.

Click through to PIR Education to get the full piece and share with all and sundry.