Making Maths Count

Let’s Get Started! Maths Week Scotland: Monday

September 10, 2018 by Chris McCord No Comments | Category Uncategorized

Let’s Get Started! Maths Week Scotland: Monday

It’s finally, here. Maths Week Scotland 2018 is a go and what a start! All over the country we have been seeing how schools and communities are celebrating. There is still time to get involved with competitions, activities and online at www.nms.ac.uk/maths.

If you want to find out how maths is used in different careers University of Edinburgh have created a series of videos Maths Week at Work showing how maths is used in jobs such as programming as jewellery making. Each video also features a mathematical problem these people face in their day to day jobs. Watch them here https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/school-of-mathematics/outreach/mathsweekscotland/maths-week-at-work

This morning Arbroath High School had a visit from Tom Briggs, from Bletchley Park. Students found out all about the history of Bletchley Park, and the role of mathematicians played in cracking codes during the Second World War.

Tom hadn’t just come on his own though, he brought with him a real working enigma machine. And not just any enigma machine! The machine is the same one which starred in the film The Imitation Game.

1 Enigma Machine at Arbroath High School, the one which featured in The Imitation Game film!

2 Mr Todd tries out the enigma machine

Students worked together to crack codes set by Tom and learnt how to set an enigma machine to decipher coded messages. There are 159 quintillion possible ways (that’s 159,000,000,000,000,000,000!) to set an enigma machine so we didn’t have time to go through them all this morning but it was fantastic to use logical thinking to crack the code set. Students at Arbroath High School will be continuing the code theme during their lessons throughout the week. The enigma machine will be continuing its adventures to all Angus Secondary Schools during Maths Week.

In the Highlands at Newton Park Primary School, Kjartan Poskitt shared maths fun 200 school pupils from 7 different primary schools. He will be doing 10 gigs in schools in the Highlands and Orkney, and performing at Orkney Science Festival throughout Maths Week 2018.

On social media we have seen some fantastic things happening in schools. Lots of schools have been trying out the Daily Puzzle set by John Swinney. There will be a new puzzle set each day so try it yourself!

Other schools have been incorporating maths across the curriculum and even out in the playground. We have loved seeing the range of ways people are celebrating Maths Week and the unusual places people are finding maths inspiration.