Congratulations

... to Alex Jack and Lydia who got their GCSE Results today.

They took their full GCSE Maths early in November, having taught themselves most of the course, and being supported by the Maths team.

Their A* results (all of them) is a reflection of the hard work and attention to detail they showed in preparing for their exams.

All three will now be sitting the new GCSE Further Maths course in the Summer, and we look forward to their continued success in their mathematical studies!

Well done!

Year 7 Data Collection

We're also looking forward to
challenging you on
World Maths day 2012!

Please help my 7B2 maths class.

We are hoping  to collect data from as many Year 5, Year 6 and Year 7 as we can, from around the world.


For international visitors, this is students born between 1st September 1999 and 31st August 2002

The links below are to each group of students questionnaires. Please please complete as many of them as you feel able to do, and pass the link of this blog around your classmates  / friends / family.

We will publish the results of our data collection through this blog also. We are going to leave the forms open for a while to allow schools on holiday in January (I'm looking at you Australia!) to contribute.


Many many thanks in advance.

On the first day of christmas...

You all know the song... 

On the first day of Christmas my true love gasve to me a artridge in a pear tree..

And so on. For mathematicians everywhere, there are three questions about this song that are just screaming to be asked, and one of those questions can easily be answered.

The second one is a little more difficult, and the third especially so in this day and age.

The first question that tends to get asked is "how many presents does this mean my true love gives me?"

You do need to be careful here, it is not necessarily as easy as people first think (much of maths isn't!). The most common response is to do 1+2+3+ ... +12 = 78, but a little further inspection suggests this may not be the full answer.

Day 1 - A partridge in a pear tree. 1 present

How many presents on day 2? It's not 2...

Day 2 - 2 Turtle Doves and a partridge in a pear tree, That's three presents, so after 2 days you have already been given 4 presents.

What about day three? How many presents on day 3? How many does that make altogether? Now, day 4, day 5, and so on all the way to day 12.

How many presents have you got altogether?

How many of each present (I hope you like gold rings!)

Question 2 is what about the 'n' days of christmas. There is a formula for the total number of presents you get over n (any number of)  days, but it is not a trivial solution.

Question 3 is less maths, and more economics... For the twelve days of christmas, how much would it cost!! Good luck ith that; whilst gold rings may be in the Argos catalogue, or on Amazon, and you may be able to source a pear tree at Whitehall Garden Centre, you may struggle a little more with the French Hens, Turtle Doves, and as for Lords a Leaping, I've no idea where to even start!

Good luck!

Y10 Do the Apprentice

Congratulations to Year 10 for a fabulous Business and Enterprise PSHEE day based on The Apprentice.

As well as learning about about personal and business finance options, Year 10 planned an event, designing tickets, room layout, and catering (including cupcakes!) and  entertainment options.

They came dressed to do business, as you can see from the pictures below.

Best Maths Question... Ever...

Have a look at the link below.

I'm not sure I've worked out the answer!

What do you all think...

http://flowingdata.com/2011/10/28/best-statistics-question-ever/

St Dunstans Visit

Huge thanks to year 6 for letting me visit today, and talk about codes and ciphers.  This is a part of their work on World War 2 at the moment.




We looked at some older ways of hiding codes, including shaving heads, tattooing it, and then letting the hair grow back, wrapping a strip of paper around a stick, and then writing the message, and even writing the message on the inside of a hard boiled egg (sadly this experiment has now failed 3 times, so it is not the most reliable method!!


We moved on to look at Caesar ciphers, pigpen ciphers (font here), and the Sherlock Holmes Dancing men cipher (Font here).  NB. Please ask permission before installing new fonts to your computer.


Eventually we moved on to talk about the magnificent work done by Bletchley PArk code breakers during the second world war.  We found a major flaw in the enigma code by putting loads and loads of 'D's into a virtual enigma, and looking at the output.  Here is the virtual enigma we used - can you spot any flaws!


I want to thank Y6 at St Dunstans again for letting me visit, and making me feel so welcome.  Hopefully many of them will work with us on the National Cipher Challenge when they join us next year

KS4 Parents Forum

We hope you found the KS4 Parents forum useful.

Here are the slideshows from the evening, in case you either missed the evening, or want to recheck any dates.

Y10 Maths

Y10 English

Y11 Maths

Y11 English