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.

Planning for September: Year 12

I'm looking forward to teaching the new linear A level to two Year 12 classes this year. I've been preparing some materials for these classes and thought it might be helpful to share them here, in case they are of use to anyone.

1. Scheme of work and resources
When preparing schemes of work, schools have had to look very carefully at timings to make sure they can fit all of the A level content into the two year time frame (I blogged about this here). At my school we took the estimated hours from Edexcel's scheme of work as a starting point and cut everything by around a third - it just about works, though our teaching will be rather rushed.

My school's new A level scheme of work looks very similar to our GCSE scheme of work, with a front page showing an approximate timeline and then a more detailed page for each topic showing the specification and resources. We won't have any student textbooks so links to resources are vital. I've blogged about A level resources before and many of these are still useful for the new A level. There are a few gaps for new topics but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

Although the content of the maths specification hasn't changed dramatically, there are a few minor tweaks that we need to look out for. For example the AS specification now includes fractional inequalities like those shown below (these were previously on FP2 for Edexcel). It's a subtle change and straightforward to teach, but could easily be missed.

From Pearson Textbook Pure AS (spot the typo!)

Many schools are planning to teach the pure content first and leave the applied content until later in the year. When we come to the applied content, it will be useful to refer to Edexcel's Teaching Guide for Mechanics and Teaching Guide for Statistics.

2. First lesson
I've created a PowerPoint for my first lesson with Year 12 which you're very welcome to borrow and adapt. It includes course information, some introductory algebra activities (from Don Steward, Susan Whitehouse and Underground Maths), and the entry assessment I blogged about here.

First lesson activity from Susan Whitehouse

3. Student blog
At my previous school I was a Key Stage 5 Coordinator and really enjoyed running a simple blog for Sixth Form students. I hope to do this again this year. I've set one up at glynmaths.blogspot.co.uk and will use it to share information and exercises with students. As they won't have textbooks, it's important that I make sure they have access to plenty of independent study material throughout the course.

4. Student handbook and checklist
Our Sixth Form students are required to keep a course handbook or specification in their folder for every subject. This year I have updated our handbook for the new A level, including the topic checklist at the back. If you'd like to borrow and adapt this, there's a Word version here.

Delivering the new A level will be hard work for all involved, particularly for those teaching Further Maths. Initially we will have all the same challenges that we had for the new GCSE - a lack of past papers, relatively few resources, no grade boundaries and uncertainty around timings. But nevertheless, I think we're all really looking forward to getting stuck into teaching it next month.

Teaching support from Tarquin A level

5 Maths Gems #75

Welcome to my 75^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. New Displays
I recently updated my displays page with some lovely new resources. This might be useful for teachers preparing their classrooms or corridors for September. One of my favourites is the new Maths Word of the Week display from @missradders.

2. Algebra Maze
Last month I joined the MA and received an exciting parcel full of publications. This included an edition of Mathematics in School in which I spotted this algebraic expressions maze from MEI.

The MEI wrote eleven consecutive articles for Mathematics in School and are soon to start up again. You can access all eleven of these MEI Insights here - thanks to @MEImaths for sharing these.

3. New A level Resources
I now have a page of resources for new A level topics. It's much like my new GCSE support page, but I'm still hunting for resources.

Thankfully a few new A level resources have been published recently:

• Jamie Frost (@DrFrostMaths) has started to share his new A level PowerPoints (these accompany the Pearson textbook). On his new A level page, Jamie has also shared his excellent guide to the Classwiz calculator, his school's new A level scheme of work, and a compilation of STEP/AEA/MAT questions by topic.
• Jack Brown (@TLMaths) has shared around 300 videos for students for the new A level. 
• Dr Madas has started adding new specification IYGB papers to his brilliant collection.
• MEI have shared some samples of the resources from their new schemes of work. 

4. Sector Area

In my post 'Polygraph Rocks' I wrote about the wonderful Desmos classroom activities. There's now a huge collection of activities on Desmos - they're definitely worth exploring. These lessons are really easy to run and work well if you have access to a decent IT room or if your students have tablets or laptops in the classroom. I spotted 'Sector Area' on Twitter recently and really like the way it's designed. It's a proportional reasoning activity in which students explore the relationship between circle area, sector area, and sector angle.

5. xaktly
I found the website xaktly.com by Dr Jeff Cruzan (@DrCruzan) which is like an online textbook for maths, physics, chemistry and biology. The maths section contains very clear explanations and some helpful graphics on misconceptions, definitions and methods.

The page on the metric system is a good example - Dr Cruzan's method for unit conversions is interesting and worth a look.

There's lots of A level content, including a page on optimisation with very useful example problems. 

Update
In case you missed them, here are my latest posts:

• Bridging the Gap... Revisited
• What did I miss?
• Strength in Numbers
• The Folder Experiment... Revisited

I also published a list of maths education conferences for 2017/18 and my case study was featured on mtpt.org.uk.

My Summaths event is in three weeks and now I've seen the programme of workshops I'm even more excited. I'm also really pleased that I've had some generous donations of freebies to hand out on the day. There are still a few tickets left and booking closes on 14th August.

Do check out Craig Barton's latest podcasts and Adam Creen's list showing where to buy the cheapest calculators this summer.

In case you missed it, I'll leave you with this wonderful news about the success of the UK team at this year's International Maths Olympiad in Rio. The UK finished in ninth place, out of 111 participating countries, and top of all European nations for the first time ever.

The UK is hosting the International Maths Olympiad in 2019. Incidentally, Dr Geoff Smith's 'Advice to Young Mathematicians' is worth reading.