Visualising Indices

Year 8 had some fun trying to 'Visualise indices'. The activity is published here - Visualising Indices. The main aim of the task is to try and create images that help us understand what 4 to the power of 5, for example, actually means! Try yourselves, what number does the picture below represent?

Here is a gallery of the work that students produced! Some brilliant stuff!

In addition to this we had a whole new take on the task this year as well. One student decide to make a stop animation video to visualise the number the video is shown below,

Who are we? A data project!

Students have been embarking on a whole school data collection exercise this last week. We have asked the whole school community about their daily habits, physical measurements,  nationalities, backgrounds, languages, reading habits, homework habits, computer usage, summer holiday travel and religion! The result is a huge database of information about us as we are in September 2012 which we are in the process of turning in to a display for our school reception! Other departments are collaborating with us as well as we try to look at how data and statistics are relevant across the curriculum. Our other goal is to try and bridge the gap between standard graphs and meaningless infographics to try and present the data in an interesting style whilst still being accurate. I am most looking forward to how we all interpret the data about students favourite subjects. In maths we are determined to develop an algorithm that ensures we come out on top!

Projects on the go so far....

• Life size cut outs of the average students for each year group
• Gapminder style scattergraphs showing the relationship between height, armspan, age, nationality and gender all in two graphs!
• Barcharts made out of piles of books showing homework and reading habits !
• All the nationalities of the school represented by their flags where the size of the flag represents the proportion of students with that nationality!
• and more......

We'll try and post photos of our efforts here!

The real thing

You get a lot of those coloured-balls-in-a-bag questions in maths lessons. But you don't see it very often in real life. So I was pleased and surprised to see a real-life example in the boulangerie near school. I asked if I could take a couple of photos:

So you can win:

● An isothermal bag

● An inflatable cushion

● A set of beach rackets

● Nothing

There are a number of mathematical questions you could ask here...