Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 2d

Unfortunately, for me, there was an even number in the class, so I had no-one to play against.

Fortunately, however, I had an online version of the game I made, which allowed me to play against the computer instead!

interwovenmaths.com/_DigitDisgui...

Digit Disguises

interwovenmaths.com

2 4

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 2d

In #MathsToday*, I introduced Year 12 to the brilliant game Digit Disguises by @davidkbutler.bsky.social.

See here:
www.adelaide.edu.au/mathslearnin...

They really enjoyed it and immediately started coming up with lots of clever strategies.

*(Actually #Maths~16DaysAgo, but I've been a bit busy!)

1 17

Reposted by Nathan Day

Kathryn Clark @arithmaticks.bsky.social · 15d

Used @nathanday.bsky.social ’s sum-product(-difference-quotient) tables in an intervention session with Y10 in #MathsToday to support their factorisation of quadratics with negatives. Was really helpful to isolate the step of considering all the sign combos! 🤩
interwovenmaths.com/four-ops-tab...

Four Operations Completion Tables - Interwoven Maths

by Nathan Day (@nathanday314) https://twitter.com/hashtag/FourOpsTables PPT Download PDF Download

interwovenmaths.com

4 14

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 20d

To be fair, I already suggested it to you as a title in a conversation two years ago!

1

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 20d

I'm not sure 'taught and shared' sounds quite enough like 'thought and said' for this title to work, but oh well.

Complete Mathematics @lasalleed.bsky.social · 20d

📣 #MathsConf39: The Best That Has Been Taught and Shared with Nathan Day (@nathanday314)

Explore all-time great maths tasks, why they work, and how to adapt or design your own to enrich lessons & inspire learners.

completemaths.com/community/ma...

#UKMathsChat

2 2

Reposted by Nathan Day

Complete Mathematics @lasalleed.bsky.social · 20d

📣 #MathsConf39: The Best That Has Been Taught and Shared with Nathan Day (@nathanday314)

Explore all-time great maths tasks, why they work, and how to adapt or design your own to enrich lessons & inspire learners.

completemaths.com/community/ma...

#UKMathsChat

4 4

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 23d

In particular, the second row of the table (Finding an inequality with solution set 0 < x ≤ 1) prompted great discussions about whether it could be done with a quadratic, properties of asymptotes, etc.

2

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 23d

In #MathsToday, Year 12 tackled some Underground Maths tasks on inequalities.

Inequality sets: undergroundmathematics.org/polynomials/...

Inequalities for some occasions:
undergroundmathematics.org/quadratics/i...

I always find with their tasks there's more to them than initially meets the eye.

$A three-circle Venn diagram labelled A, B, and C inside a rectangle. Each region represents inequalities with certain properties: • A: the solution set is a subset of x \leq 1. • B: the solution set is of the form a \leq x \leq b. • C: the inequality is satisfied by x = 4. Below the diagram is a set of numbered inequalities in boxes. The task is to place each inequality into the correct region of the Venn diagram according to the properties of its solution set. https://undergroundmathematics.org/quadratics/inequalities-for-some-occasions$

A table with three columns: “Solution set”, “Graph”, and “Inequality”. Each row must be completed so that it contains:
• a solution set written in set notation,
• a graph showing a function or curve to help solve the inequality,
• the inequality itself.

Some rows are partially filled with either a solution set, a graph, or an inequality, and the student must fill in the missing parts to match them consistently.

https://undergroundmathematics.org/polynomials/inequalities

1 3 15

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 25d

Or, as David Foster Wallace put it, 'There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.'

"Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing."
https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

1 1

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · 26d

In #MathsToday, Year 12 looked at some graph intersections and solving some simultaneous equations, and then sketching the graphs!

A maths worksheet titled “Simultaneous Equations & Points of Intersection.” It shows a grid where different pairs of equations intersect, and the task is to fill in the correct intersection points from a list of given coordinates. Some boxes are shaded and students must explain how many intersection points there are, without calculating the coordinates.

1 6 18

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Sep 8

Lots more of Susan Wall's excellent tasks can be found at:
www.stem.org.uk/resources/re...

I'm finding a lot of them are great for generating interesting discussions and helping me work out which bits of the early chapters of AS Pure can be skipped.

| STEM

STEM Learning Ltd offers the largest collection of learning resources for teachers and educators of science, technology, engineering, computing and mathematics in the UK.

www.stem.org.uk

1 5

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Sep 8

Other ones we've done include:
1) another nice quadratics task with some lovely generalisinging

2) an odd one out indices task, with opportunities for some creativity when giving the odd ones out friends!

Maths question titled ‘Suggest possible equations for the graphs on the diagram. Generalise your answer.’ The diagram shows two parabolas: one opening upwards and one opening downwards. They touch at a single point above the x-axis, forming a point of tangency. The task is to suggest equations for these parabolas and to generalise the form of such equations.

Maths problem saying ‘Identify the odd one out in each row. Fill the gap so that it is no longer odd.’
In each row there are three expressions with powers, with one that is not equal to the other two. There is a space on each row to fill with something equal to the odd one out.

2 3

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Sep 8

In #MathsToday, Year 12 and I enjoyed doing some Susan Wall tasks.

I particularly enjoyed this one. We matched the graphs up, and then found the coordinates of all the interesting points.

“Maths question titled ‘Which equation matches which graph?’ On the left, five quadratic equations are listed: (1) y = 6x – 3x² – 3, (2) y = x² – 2x + 5, (3) y = x² – 2x – 3, (4) y = 2x – x² + 3, (5) y = 3x² – 6x + 3. On the right, five parabolas are drawn on a coordinate grid, some opening upwards and some downwards, intersecting around the origin. The task is to match each equation to its corresponding parabola and explain the reasoning.”

3 5 33

Reposted by Nathan Day

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Aug 25

For those unfortunate enough to be starting back tomorrow...

Over the summer Duelling Mathematicians has had a bit of an upgrade.

Loads of new question types, game statistics, and design tweaks, but the same frenetic music and sound effects.

More to come!

interwovenmaths.com/_Duels.html

A screenshot of the end screen to a game of Duelling Mathematicians, showing the new Duel Statistics pop-up.

3 15

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Aug 29

It's a ship joke.

1 1

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Aug 27

I hope my Year 10s have enjoyed their summer holiday work, which included various options from the likes of @ayliean.bsky.social, @tibees.bsky.social, @elliesleightholm.bsky.social, @meimaths.bsky.social, @nrichmaths.bsky.social, @simonsinghnerd.bsky.social, and @desmos.com.

(All links in alt text)

6 15

Reposted by Nathan Day

Karen @karenshancock.bsky.social · Aug 27

I've done some work on collated my worked examples over the holidays.
Here's the database of those I've created over the past few years. Perhaps you can make use of them in your teaching too?

kshancock.co.uk/workedexampl...

#UKMathsChat

Worked Example Database | kshancock.co.uk

kshancock.co.uk

12 22

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Aug 26

I love these reflections, especially 4.

I often tell students how I used to teach DofE expeditioners to keep checking that things they could see on the map matched reality and that things they saw in reality could also be found on the map.
Always looking out for mathematical points of interest!

5

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Aug 25

For those unfortunate enough to be starting back tomorrow...

Over the summer Duelling Mathematicians has had a bit of an upgrade.

Loads of new question types, game statistics, and design tweaks, but the same frenetic music and sound effects.

More to come!

interwovenmaths.com/_Duels.html

3 15

Nathan Day @nathanday.bsky.social · Aug 17

Just gave this a rather significant visual upgrade.

It's now quite colourful, matching the textbooks!

I've also added in totals, but they tend to be off by a couple of marks from the official ones as they are just the sums of the notional component boundaries.

interwovenmaths.com/_GradeBounda...