Making Your Own Sense

Reflections on maths, learning and maths learning support, by David K Butler

Tag: outreach

  • Numbers and Letters

    Since 2013, the MLC and Writing Centre have been doing a game called Letters and Numbers at Orientation Weeks and Open Days to create interaction with people. I tweeted a photo of one of our sessions during Open Day yesterday and it has attracted a lot of attention, so I thought I might record some details of the game for people to read if they’re interested.

    You can read the rest of this blog post, and four other related posts, in PDF form here. 

    The titles of the five posts are:

    • Numbers and Letters (2018)
    • An opening gambit for the Numbers Game (2017)
    • Changing the goal of the Numbers Game (2020)
    • Jack Frost’s centre (2015)
    • The Arts student’s maths brain (2017)

  • The Human Galton Board

    Last week we were booked in to do Human Markov Chains with several groups of school students, but it turned out there would be a lot fewer of them than we expected, and I didn’t think Human Markov Chains would work very well with under 20 students. I still dearly wanted to do a moving maths activity, and I still wanted it to be about probability, but I wasn’t sure what to do. Then, on the morning of the day the students were coming, I had an inspiration and quickly knocked together the Human Galton Board.

    You can read the rest of this blog post in PDF form here. 

  • Human Markov Chains

    This blog post is about a moving maths activity that I have wanted to do for years and finally got an opportunity to do this year in 2018. It’s a model of a concept called a “Markov Chain” using human movement.

    You can read the rest of this blog post in PDF form here. 

  • A Day of Maths

    Last Monday, I was invited into my daughter’s Year 7 classroom to do a full day of maths with the students. It was the Best Day Ever.  I had so much fun giving the students things to think about, and watching and helping the students think and talk about them.

    You can read the series of seven blog posts in PDF form here. 

    The titles of the seven posts are:

    • Best! Day! Ever!
    • Quarter the cross
    • Zero zeros
    • Spotless dice
    • Looking at maths art
    • Hotel Infinity
    • Thanks for coming