In keeping with the ‘Powering Learning’ theme of BETT 2012, Maths-Whizz, the online suite of services that guarantees raised standards in numeracy for  5 to 13 year-olds, is encouraging visitors to ‘power happiness in numbers’. The award-winning system encompasses online tutoring service Tutoring Plus and the online, teacher-led content library, Teachers’ Resource. Maths-Whizz creates positive learning outcomes by building confidence and encouraging shared, interactive learning at home and in schools. Crucially, progress is measurable, as students are continually assessed. This detailed real-time reporting is very beneficial for schools wishing to access government funding.
Visitors to BETT will be able to experience Maths-Whizz first hand. Demonstrations by practitioners (teachers and non-teachers), using whole-class interactive tools and best practise guidance, will show why Maths-Whizz is proven to raise standards in maths. The newly-launched features of Teachers’ Resource* (v 3.2) and a superb related show offer* complete the Maths-Whizz BETT experience.
Visitors to BETT 2012 are invited to:
•    Meet Whizz Prof, in attendance each day.

There will also be plenty of stickers, pens and other treats for teachers to take away for their school.

•    Take advantage of the  BETT school offer:
In addition, and exclusive to BETT visitors, any school that buys at BETT will be able to buy version 3.2 of BETT award-winning Teachers’ Resource for just £750*.

•    Come to our events:
Daily discussion forum with current teacher and Headteacher Maths-Whizz Users, please follow us  on twitter @whizzprof  for more details.
Educationalists Katie Krais and Lorrae Jaderberg share perspectives on how to raise numeracy standards through after school clubs on Thursday 12th.

Now that we have literally thousands of users, we at Whizz can begin to see the exercises which are more of a struggle than others, and frankly there are exercises we must  improve to ensure  that the children do really understand the learning objective all the time. A  Certain of our tests get failed much more than others which could be about the test or the animation which preceded it as we know, for example, that many children struggle with telling the time on an analog clock. Mine did, how about yours?

Occasionally we find that we have been too hard on our users. In one of our exercises for 7 year olds, we didn’t realise (until the consistently high failure rate convinced us!) that we were expecting them to be familiar with 3x, 4x and 5x number facts when at that age level, the curriculum requires only 2x and 10x knowledge. Hopefully now, many fewer of our children will have to face repeating one of the 7 year old animated exercises over and over again.

Many of the other most highly failed animated exercises are Rapid Recall ones. They are usually fun to do and frankly if they get failed a lot, it’s no bad thing if the child has to do them again. In a few cases, we are going to review the times we allow for the answer to be given. But we don’t want that time to be long enough to use a calculator or to go and find Dad! We’ve got some other ideas up our sleeve for this issue but it would be great to hear some suggestions from our users. So please do let us know what you think.

With tests we know we have to find a balance between going slightly beyond how we have taught the learning objective- without going beyond, you can’t always test whether the point of the exercise has been understood- and taking too big a step. We know we haven’t always got that balance right and are fine tuning where necessary. There’s no sense in having a test which only a tiny minority can pass first time, and condemning children to excessive repeats of the same animation.

In the Parent Dashboard we have through Exercise Preview given parents the possibility of allowing their child to skip repeating an animation but it’s a nuclear option which we would rather never had to be used!

Care to comment on any of these issues? We would love to hear your thoughts!

The article’s authors, Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford, argue strongly in favour of a maths curriculum that exists in relation to the science, engineering, finance (and so on) that it serves every day, and they say why it’s so important.

Garfunkel and Mumford make an analogy with languages. Learning French teaches both abstract grammatical skills and practical language, but you will never have the chance to use Latin to buy a loaf of bread. In this respect – they argue – the abstract skills that you might gain from a dead language are wasted if they aren’t learned in a context that you can use.

This chimes with recent suggestions from a review into maths education in the UK (led by the lovely Carol Vorderman) that our maths curriculum pre-A-level should be broken up into ‘practical’ and ‘formal’ maths.

In this curriculum every student takes practical maths, arming them for a life choosing between mortgages and interpreting medical test results. More able and motivated students can opt to take the additional formal, and more abstract, maths module.

Mumford and Garfunkel say that the new US Common Core State Standards, which I’ve helped Whizz align its maths lessons to, is “highly abstract”, and “simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life.” But I’m not sure they’ve got the point of that (or any) curriculum. A curriculum should tell teachers and students what they need to study, not necessarily how, or even why, except maybe to put a subject in context.

It’s the good teacher who draws the abstract and the practical together to greatest effect. Not every teacher – especially at primary level – may be confident enough to link the two, but by giving the teacher the opportunity to do this, rather than prescribing how to apply ‘practical’ maths, an ‘abstract’ curriculum can be as relevant as the teacher and her students want it to be.

Maths is often called the science of patterns. And if chemistry really comes alive when we blow something up, then maths should come alive when we use it to, say, spot the ‘golden ratio’ in Chartres Cathedral (see Marcus du Sautoy’s BBC Series, The Code).

But it’s a two-way street. Project Euler, which I wrote about last month, trains budding programmers by getting them to solve maths puzzles. Garfunkel and Mumford say that practical skills, like learning to code, are more useful than abstract, but in the case of Project Euler the abstract is successfully used to teach the practical, and with some success.

I’ll concede that the principle outlined by Mumford, Garfunkel, Vorderman, et al – of the difference between the maths you use to calculate change and the maths you use to describe fractal geometry – makes perfect sense. But it may be a false distinction.

Whizz Education US company president, Ben, has a skill which I envy – he can intuitively understand the relationships between numbers. For me, it’s not quite so easy, but I wouldn’t want to be denied this insight into abstract maths because of a lack of natural ability; I can still appreciate Chartres Cathedral.

To return to the NY Times’ authors’ analogy, I took Latin and Ancient Greek at GCSE – two subjects that are, in themselves, utterly useless in the real world. But I was enriched by learning them. I could spot some of the hidden histories and meanings in words with ancient roots, and read street signs in modern versions of the ancient Greek alphabet.

If creativity lies in making connections between apparently unrelated subjects then ‘pure’, or theoretical, maths must be vital for creative young science minds, wherever they are. To assume that they should only use maths that tells them how to calculate compound interest (a truly vital skill) is to assume that they will get no pleasure from discovering a subject for its own sake. And that is sad.

At Maths-Whizz we try to instil a sense both of the practical and the abstract – and with our 1200+ maths lessons there’s ample opportunity for the young Whizzer to link the two. As Hilary and Steve, two of our expert founding mathematicians, once pointed out to me – put a pound sign in front of a sum or subtraction with decimal values and it suddenly becomes easier.

So, here’s to producing mathematicians who know that the abstract and the practical are two sides of the same coin. It’s a coin that can teach them as much about pi – that most wonderful of irrational numbers – as it can about the price of a loaf of bread.

The paper in question purports to describe odds of the author finding his ‘perfect partner’ as 1 in 285,000. To haul the paper marginally out of author Peter Backus’ navel he derives this figure with a personal variation on the Drake Equation, which describes the possibility of our galaxy harbouring communicating civilisations [click the link to see a nice interactive explanation of how the Drake Equation works].

The God of Whizz is as much a fan of whimsical investigations as the next educational deity, and very much a fan of how simple maths problems can shine light on apparently intractable problems.

But Backus’ paper is good only as a promotional piece with an apparently depressing result. Even so, it has generated a lot of publicity, thanks to the idea that Backus has hit upon some kind of magical equation for love (or the lack thereof).

The Drake Equation is a neat exercise in the effects of multiplying odds when you’re combining known and unknown values and an oft-heard criticism is that multiplying possibilities multiplies the possibility for error.

Backus’ equation substitutes Drake’s little-known vastnesses of space and time for the guesswork values of physical and emotional attachment. The error bar alongside his final number must be so wide as to make it usable only as an exercise in basic maths.

We can see a response to Backus’ huge odds against love in the anthropic principle. It is often said that the universe is fantastically unlikely ever to have taken shape, let alone to have allowed the development of intelligent life. And yet, we’re here.

The anthropic principle inverts this. It says, simply*, that the fact we’re here means it’s possible. The same argument meets Backus’ paper with the simple observation: “even ugly, picky people in small towns fall in love”, which becomes what I call the Amatory Principle (something I’ve just made up).

The Amatory Principle notes that people find love, all the time, everywhere, and in the unlikeliest of circumstances. It’s a staple of fiction, but it’s also true. Happiness in love is out there, ergo happiness in love is possible and whatever statistical rules say otherwise must be adjusted.

The punchline to all this is that Backus has a girlfriend! This is just fine, of course, because Backus has proved the Amatory Principle.

The grump in me says that I couldn’t give a fig if the whole exercise was for fun, because it has been laundered through various media as something of value, touching on the ineffable figures that underpin our lives, even if just with a nod and a wink.

I feel for the University of Warwick press officer charged with raising their employer’s profile as a seat of learning with a four-page bit of fun put out by a post-graduate. I would exhort him or her to watch the fascinating new BBC documentary series with Jim Al-Khalili looking at chaos, fractals and the equations that really DO say something about life on earth (if not the chances of dating a nice London girl).

* Because I’m not clever enough to say what the complex version of the Anthropic Principle (Weak or Strong versions**) is.

** Google them if you really want to know

With the snow still here, there, and everywhere (if no longer deep and thick and even) why not wander over to the excellent Telegraph education pages, and check out our maths whizz bannerette, featured on a couple of pages, such as this one:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/6943166/Ofsted-stigmatising-schools-say-MPs.html

Even better, click the image, sign up to Whizz and give your child an educational boost with our top maths tutor during the cold winter months.

The Daily Telegraph reports the study:

Predictions of adult poverty are now so accurate that up to nine in 10 youngsters destined for a lifetime of disadvantage can be spotted and helped before they leave primary school, it says.

Even a simple copying test that gauges a child’s ability to replicate shapes and patterns at the age of five is an extremely accurate predictor of later success in school and early adulthood according to the study, by the Institute of Education at the University of London.

 

 It seems combining timely assessment of a young child’s ability with careful investigation into the family situation can identify those most at risk. The Telegraph article goes on:

Research into young children’s ability to copy patterns and shapes such as diamonds, crosses and circles has confirmed that too many bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds are failing to fulfil their potential.

The report’s press release implies that much of this is thanks to our stratified society:

“this link with success holds true for all groups except those children who achieved a high copying score but come from families with low socio-economic status. This is a worrying finding that points to a key reason for the lack of social mobility.”

The UK might be less unequal than it was in 2000, but we are still more unequal than most other wealthy nations, both findings from a recent OECD report. As Dickens would remind us, social mobility, or the fluidity between classes, has always been low in Britain.

What does this mean for you? The good news is that if your child is using Maths-Whizz he or she is already on the right track – you’ve both made the decision to improve maths skills and you should be on the way towards increasing confidence and ability in equal measure.

If you’re not using Maths-Whizz, the good news is that there is no wrong time to boost a child’s ability and confidence, and the positive effects are likely to spread beyond being able to work out the change in a shop. As the report notes:

“It is possible that doing well in maths at age 7 acts to heighten children’s self-confidence and aspirations,” the report says.

“It may also encourage teachers to offer them more support.”

So sign up to Maths-Whizz, show your child that maths and learning are important, and then tell the teacher. Simply letting teachers know that your child is putting extra effort into the subject might encourage them to take more pro-active roles in his or her classroom education.

(via The Daily Telegraph)