Life Through a Mathematician's Eyes

This activity explores the properties and uses of “magic squares.” The purpose of this activity is for pupils to experiment with magic square design while also finding more about the history of magic squares and their different uses. 

At the start of the school year I have asked all my classes the following question: “what is mathematics?”. I didn’t expect much, but I was curious what children of ages 11 – 14 think about this. From my point of view this question doesn’t have an exact answer yet. There are still many mathematicians and philosophers that try to find an answer. 

Recently I have been for holiday to Romania. During that journey I have thought at different things that could have transformed it into a maths related one. I feel that every holiday could become a maths-camp if you can find the right questions and use your creativity and maths knowledge at the maximum. So this post is directed more to parents, who I think could transform their children’s holidays in any way they want.

Last lesson of the year: mind-map on maths and everything they have learnt the whole year. This lesson was done with S1 pupils (11-12 years old). 

This post is inspired by one of the workshops I participated at the One-Day Conference for the Teachers of Secondary Mathematics. The workshop was about how Singapore students are taught to use some sort of graphical method to solve increasingly complex problems such as ratio, percentage change or simultaneous equations.

Here are some good mathematical concepts that The Hunger Games Trilogy offer us. We just have to open our eyes and enjoy maths. So lets start understanding the concepts.

The lesson I want to talk about is on graphs of trigonometric functions (sine and cosine). In this lesson, I wanted to present the transformations: stretching and translating.

The lesson was on direct proportion and I had the feeling that all the exercises from the text book were quite boring. All the children new already what direct proportion means approximately. I think this topic was really easy for them because they use it every single day, so I thought about using some other examples which they found more interesting.