Mathematics Stories

Thinking about Mathematics ‘stories’  reminded me of  ’John and Betty’s Journey into Complex Numbers‘ which has always made me smile.

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For a rather different kind of presentation – why not write a ‘story’ ?  There are many online tools available, a favourite of mine is Storybird.

I wrote a very simple story on algebra (like terms) simply to show some students Storybird and hopefully inspire them to write their own (they did!).

Some of my students helped me write this on sequences:

….and when they were revising for exams they wrote several more!

Storybird is a tool for writing digital stories, it’s great fun and easy to use. Set up an account (free) – choose your art work and get writing! Students under 13 can sign up with parental permission. Note that teachers can set up class accounts for students of any age. See the details here.

There is a training video available from Russell Stannard’s TeachertrainingVideos site.

Manga High – Prodigi Quizzes

Teachers here’s everything you need to know about getting started at Manga High.

And let’s hear it for Manga High – their high quality games and Prodigi quizzes are free all the time – thank you Manga High! Note that Manga High is now completely free in several countries including UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, all of Scandinavia and the Indian subcontinent. Here’s what some of my students think.

Manga High seems well known for its games, it is also well worth investigating the excellent Prodigi quizzes available.

Hundreds of these are available offering excellent curriculum coverage. The search facility offers teachers the opportunity to filter by curriculum area, age, level and whether a calculator is allowed. For example a simple search of Prodigi quizzes on Algebra gives the following results:

Unlike the available games students cannot see the available Prodigi quizzes unless a teacher sets them as challenges. For my own classes I set any challenge with a date sufficiently far in the future such as the end of the academic year which means my students can access those challenges whenever they want to. You can view very clear instructions on setting challenges on the Manga High website.

Short versions of the games are available to try, students can play full length versions for free once a school account is created logins issued. Let’s play!

Pretty Graphs!

The Desmos graphing calculator has to be one of my favourite graphing tools. It’s powerful, easy to use, allows one to share graphs and it is possible to create an account and save graphs.

Using the sliders feature students could investigate any graphs. The Further Mathematicians could easily explore the family of rose curves for example. Click on the image below then play with the slider!

For further applets and resources to explore polar curves see this page on Mathematics Calculators.
For more information on the Desmos calculator see this post and coming soon a tutorial for students.

Mathematics Posters

A consistently popular post on this blog is the one on Mathematics posters. An excellent new addition to the list of sources of free posters is Jenny Eather’s Maths Charts  which includes over 200 posters on a wide variety of topics. (Jenny Eather’s dictionary is also excellent).

For a list of sites including free posters use this Diigo list or Evernote shared notebook.
(You do not need to be an Evernote or Diigo user to use these lists though I recommend both highly).

To highlight a small number of the sites on the list:

Nrich have turned many of their excellent problems into attractive posters. Note the link right at the bottom of the page to a PowerPoint presentation showing all the posters.

The Classic Mistake site has a wonderful collection of those classic mistakes that teachers regularly see. These posters can be downloaded in colour or black and white, a podcast explaining the mistake is also available for each poster.
Note all the other downloads available from the same site.

The Mathematical Moments site features many downloadable pdfs, posters which show the role that Mathematics plays in Science, Technology and Human Culture. A short or more detailed version of each poster is available and a search is provided.

The excellent Maths Careers site includes many posters to download, ‘When Will I Ever Need Maths?‘ for example.

Using a word cloud generator such as Wordle it is very easy to make attractive vocabulary posters.
(See this post for other word cloud tools and ideas for use in the classroom).

Image from http://www.wordle.net/ 

….and on a lighter note, my son sent me this recently! From GraphJam.com.

see more Funny Graphs

World Maths Day Registration

Update: World Maths Day is over for another year! You can see the Hall of Fame on the site. Mathletics do have a subscription service.

If you like these kind of games and want some free ones then see this post!