Fun with Maths
We had a dude in school today showing how fun maths can be. Sadly I only made it to one of his sessions and there weren't many problems for me to get my teeth into, but it was good to see pupils being asked to think outside the box and prove things. For example, when I went in, they were discussing whether the product of two square numbers was always a square, which is trivial to show algebraically, but they were all trying numerical examples, and it took ages to persuade them that even if they had all afternoon to work on it they couldn't test it enough times to prove it. I wish there was more time in the curriculum to focus on proof, which is the cornerstone of mathematics but tends to get buried between attainment targets and numeracy strategies.
After school, there was a party with pizza for some pupils who entered maths early and did exceptionally well. I wanted to call this entry "a pizza the action", but I thought that might be seen as jumping on a bandwagon. But I still managed to steal a slice, and very tasty it was too!
After school, there was a party with pizza for some pupils who entered maths early and did exceptionally well. I wanted to call this entry "a pizza the action", but I thought that might be seen as jumping on a bandwagon. But I still managed to steal a slice, and very tasty it was too!
posted by Fluffy at 9:46 pm
3 Comments:
At the risk of turning this into a maths blog:
Take two square numbers, A and B. Because they are square numbers, we can say that A = a*a and B = b*b, where a and b are integers.
So the product of those two squares A*B = a*a*b*b = a*b*a*b, in other words, (a*b) squared.
Hence the product of two squares is always a square.
If you can think of proving it like that, clearly it's obvious. I'm more interested in the problem of making it accessible to someone who's not comfortable with the whole letters-standing-for-numbers thing. Is there a way of getting the same point across graphically?
The sibling.
Agreed (I was drawn by the original "trivial to do it algebraically" bit). But to explain it without algebra, hmmm. One way to approach it is through prime factorisation, which gets rid of the letters but still requires the grasp of a sometimes difficult concept...
Post a Comment
<< Home