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]

We’ve just added a fabulous new feature – Maths Challenges – to our burgeoning range of tools proven to boost kids’ maths abilities.

With Challenge, students can use their maths skills to take on all-comers from across the globe. We have thousands of Maths-Whizz students in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Australasia.

Until yesterday, Maths-Whizzers had to share maths skills and a lesson history with one of their limited buddy list. Now the Maths-Whizz system automatically locates students with similar skills profiles to be challenged on completed lessons.

If you’re a parent of a Maths-Whizzer, our latest feature will be perfect for helping you motivate your student, encourage some healthy competition, and boost their confidence in maths. Parents or teachers won’t need to worry about confidentiality, Whizzers cannot post comments to other challengers.

One thing to remember – with new Challenge we now only award credits for improving lesson scores or times in Replay. If you’re already scoring 100% with a fast time, it’s time to try another one of our 1200 animated maths lessons.

Login now to our top-flight online maths tutor to try out Challenge!

The Bolton news story notes that Blackshaw Primary School’s huge playground grid will challenge mind and body, and boost social skills.

It’s a nice example of joined-up thinking at a school and it will be interesting to see how the students end up using the grid in their spare time. After all, American children playing jump-rope devise fiendish routines by themselves; I wouldn’t be surprised if the children of Blackshaw Primary come up with some challenging games with the help of their new 100-grid.

Which reminds me – Maths-Whizz Teachers’ Resource developments are moving on apace, and something teachers can look forward to in this autumn’s update is a fully-interactive 100-grid, in response to feedback from our teachers.

Find out more about Teachers’ Resource updates in the coming months.

What? You mean you don’t know what’s in the June 2009 Maths-Whizz Tutoring Student Update? Have you been hiding in a toilet roll?
In truth, even some Whizzers don’t know the full glory of the improvements we’ve made, so for your edification I list them. Read on for more:

1. Medals in replay. You’ll see a cool animation in the student welcome screen to show the change.
Students are awarded a medal when they pass an exercise in Tutor mode. When students improve their times or scores they’ll get a better medal.

2. New tortoise! As I’d subtly hinted in the earlier blog post, the new bedroom pet in the shop is a stoical tortoise. Be the envy of your friends!

3. New whizz menu in the student bedroom. Following feedback, we’ve made this Whizz logo menu easier to use.

4. Game inflation! Games in the student game console have gone up in price to 45 credits a pop – this means you’ve gotta work harder to have fun.

5. Help screens for free account users. This should help new users find their way around the Maths-Whizz service.

Some months ago we introduced the Maths-Whizz student leaderboards. Whizzers have since been able to compare themselves to buddies, schoolmates and every other Maths-Whizz student, based on the points they’ve accrued in Tutor and Replay modes.

The Whizz leaderboard has proved so popular we’ve even fielded complaints from parents whose students were denied crucial extra points that would help them reach the top ten. But getting to the top is tough – the leaders have amassed thousands of points and upstarts have to work hard to beat them.

In response to the extraordinary popularity of the Whizz leaderboard, The God of Whizz (or ‘Duncan’, as his mother calls him) has decided to recognise top Whizzers on the Maths-Whizz ticker. Every Wednesday I’ll post the Top Ten Whizzers on the homepage.

This week students from the US, UK, UAE and India have made it to this most illustrious of lists, but lesser mortals will have the opportunity to shine with some new features that we’re releasing later this month. PLUS – a certain land-dwelling member of the family Testudinidae might make an appearance in the Whizz Shop.

All will be revealed…

This is, of course, great news for Nintendo, exciting news for primary school kids everywhere, and good news for us, too.

Scottish students with their daily dose of brain-training

The BBC and the Daily Telegraph have picked up on the story, showing how the positive impact of brain-training software on P5/P6 students at one Dundee school has been replicated with a much larger trial involving 32 schools and 600 students.

It seems the study, managed by Learning and Teaching Scotland, showed improvements in standard test results, and improved behaviour and motivation. The games might even have helped reduce absence and truancy in some classes, and they particularly benefited the weaker students, both in actual ability and confidence. Improving confidence is, as we know too well, a crucial first step in boosting a child’s actual maths ability.

We’ve been looking into new ways to get our Maths-Whizz lessons in front of students, and whilst our award-winning Teachers’ Resource is great for classes, it’s less good for so-called ‘casual learning’.

This is where the brand-new Maths-Whizz Challenge comes in. We think it’s a great way to improve basic maths and increase confidence, with a bit of healthy competition thrown in for good measure, and we’ll be looking at new and interesting platforms for Maths-Whizz exercises in the future.

Since bringing home the new Whizz CD, Kimberley, Richard and my husband Alan now have a 3 way challenge going on the p.c. in Richard’s bedroom – in fact it really got quite competitive last night!

Their activities even got my older boys very curious so they also want to get involved in ‘helping’ Kimberley and Richard with their maths to make it a five-way challenge (secretly though I think they’ve got something to prove to themselves mathematically, which is wonderful).

Maths-Whizz Challenge is a game for PCs and Macs that helps children aged 7 to 12 with core maths skills in a fun series of challenges and games, and we are very excited to announce that it will be available on Friday 5^th September at GAME stores across the UK.

With Maths-Whizz Challenge kids can pit their Maths ability against their friends and parents and flex their maths muscles over a series of 55 challenges. The interactive animated activities cover a wide range of topics, from Number to Problem-Solving, offering a manageable and stimulating tool for children of all abilities aged 7 to 12.

As with Maths-Whizz Tutoring we will send regular email reports to monitor progress, whilst players unlock more and more possibilities as they successfully complete activities. Players are awarded credits according to their performance on activities, which can be directly transferred to their virtual bedrooms online (but only if they then subscribe to Maths-Whizz Tutoring).

Maths-Whizz Challenge is not a replacement to Maths-Whizz Tutoring or our award-winning Maths-Whizz Teachers’ Resource. With 55 activities, and no exam-style tests or dictionary, it offers just a sliver of the wealth of learning material available online. Maths-Whizz Challenge will give kids of any age a fun boost in the maths basics, but only Maths-Whizz Tutoring will assess, teach and test across the curriculum.

For this reason, we’re offering free Maths-Whizz Tutoring trials to Maths-Whizz Challenge customers. If you’re an existing subscriber with other children not yet on our Tutoring service, you might want to try Maths-Whizz Challenge.

Maths-Whizz Challenge is available at GAME stores and at www.game.co.uk, priced £14.99.

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)

The UK is a world-leader in the computer games industry, but risks losing that status if not enough students come to the industry with A-level or degree-level maths and physics.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that there is some fancy programming behind stuff like this, and this, and this; but it does take a bit of foresight to arm yourself for a career in the games industry with decent science and maths qualifications.

Computer games are modelling the real-world in increasingly sophisticated ways. Not only do objects in games have to look real, but they need to act in realistic ways – fall under gravity, deform or break correctly. The so-called ‘euphoria’ physics engine behind some new computer games (see it here) takes into account how humans move and how different materials respond. 

Just as important as the physical world in video games is the human:  ‘artificial intellignce’ in computer games requires an understanding of psychology to create computer opponents worthy of the name. Rory Cellan-Jones gives a further insight into how computer games are made, here.

The top computer games of the 2020s are going to be designed and developed by the primary and secondary school children of today. If Maths-Whizz goes some way towards creating the next generation of computer experts, that’s no bad thing.