28 August 2017

Summaths 2017

My Summaths event took place yesterday in the glorious sunshine at Bletchley Park. In this post I just want to share a few highlights and say a few thank yous. This was the fourth maths teacher event that I've organised (my previous events being Christmaths 2015, Maths Meet Glyn and Christmaths 2016). I think that our online maths teaching community is wonderful so I really enjoy getting everyone together in person.

I fell in love with Bletchley Park when I visited it last summer. I knew that it would be a great venue for a maths teacher event.

75 teachers arrived bright and early on Sunday morning and spent the day exploring the beautiful Bletchley Park. Thomas Briggs ran a series of workshops on codebreaking which were very well received by all. In another room, there were maths activities and excellent Enigma demonstrations.

After a lovely lunch and glass of Pimms on the lawn by the lake, we wandered round to the National Museum of Computing. This place is awesome. They have loads of cool stuff for mathematicians, including collections of slide rules and calculators. I loved playing Mario Kart on an old N64, and one of the highlights of my day was a virtual reality dinosaur.
We returned to Bletchley Park for a super hard quiz which was won by Angus, Em, Jan, Brian, Em, Chris and Rob who only dropped one mark! Very impressive. The quiz is here if you'd like to have a go (with answers, and previous quizzes). Thank you to Ed Southall (@solvemymaths) for contributing the cryptarithm and anagrams.

Each attendee got a goody bag which contained freebies from @TTRockStars, @JaneAppleton24, @AQAMaths, @OCR_Maths, @thinkmaths, @FlipTheSystemUK, @Cipher_Master and @BuzzardPublish. Thank you very much to each of these generous contributors.

A large group of us went to the pub for dinner afterwards, and had a really nice evening.

Huge thanks to Thomas Briggs (@TeaKayB) from Bletchley Park and Jacqui Garrad (@JacquiGarrad) from The National Museum of Computing for helping me to organise the event. Thank you to everyone who enthusiastically participated, and special thanks to those who helped me fill and distribute goody bags. Finally, a huge thank you to my lovely colleague Lizzie Stokes (@MissStokesMaths) for giving me a lift to Bletchley and back.

It was a hot and tiring day, but I loved every minute. All of my photos are in a Facebook album here, and check out the hashtag #summaths to see more photos and tweets from the day.

I'm back to school on Friday, feeling inspired and raring to go.



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