Post Visit Activities
Maths Squad Activities
After a visit from the Tenix Questacon Maths Squad, have a debrief session where students can discuss the visit. What did I do? Find out? Try? Enjoy? Did it match the earlier brainstorming at all? How can I use what I learned in future maths (and other) classes at school?
To make the most of the excitement and interest generated by the Maths Squad, why not try a "daily puzzle" or "puzzle of the week" for students to work on in spare time or at home. Students themselves could contribute to this by supplying the puzzle ideas. A collection of hands-on materials is useful to help explain difficult concepts to the whole class and to individual students struggling with a concept. Much of mathematics can best be explained and understood using concrete materials and models, and many pure and applied mathematicians do just that.
Get students to make their own puzzles. They could work in their Maths Squad pair to reproduce their favourite from the session.
There are many resources available to help teachers integrate puzzles and hands-on tasks into their maths program. The Curriculum Corporation also has a Maths Task Centre Project for sale to schools. They offer a workshop training day along with a collection of 100 hands-on puzzles. These are tasks similar to the ones used by the Maths Squad.
The Maths Squad also offers a workshop for Teachers. This is designed to get your school on the road to having a Maths Task Centre. Besides an opportunity to copy down some of the Maths Squad's puzzles in 'Make and Take' sessions, discussion sessions cover such areas as setting up and running a Task Centre, teaching strategies, developing student's sense of achievement, and monitoring student's progress through the tasks.
Following Up the Demonstrations
The links to the right lead to details on some of the demonstrations you may have seen with the Tenix Questacon Maths Squad. They contain information on how to do the demonstrations, the mathematics behind them and some suggested follow-up activities that can be done in class.
Before trying any of these demonstrations in front of a class, make certain that you practice them on your own first. Some of them can be tricky the first time, so it is worth making absolutely certain you know what you are doing.
If you are reading this prior to visiting, please do not do these demonstrations for your class before the visit by the Tenix Questacon Maths Squad. This would be like giving away the end of a movie.