This is what I have so far, covers decimals, fractions, percentages, long division and multiplication and saying/writing large numbers. Am quite pleased actually!
Needs some tidying I know but am on rubbish netbook so it's not that easy.
Father christmas Maths
Exactly how magic is Father Christmas?
We are going to do an investigation into the mathematics of Father Christmas, and hopefully end up with some interesting statistics by the end of the lesson. The basic facts you will be supplied with are approximate and as follows;
There are 5.58 Billion people in the world
There are approximately 1.89 Billion are Christians.
If a quarter of these people are children under 15 (as Father Christmas doesn't deliver to adults), how many stockings does he have to deliver? 473 million children
We can estimate that each stocking weighs 0.5kg, and a lump of coal weighs 0.1kg.
If most children (say 80%) are nice and the rest are naughty, how much weight will Father Christmas have to carry at the start of his night?
80% of 473 Million is about 380 million presents, so 190 millionkg for stockings (convert to 190'000 tons)
Coal ? 95 million lumps, 0.1kg or 100g each becomes 10'000 tons of coal
If the average number of children in a family is 2, how many stops does he have to make?
236 million
What is the best path to use to get these presents as quickly as possible, without wasting time retracing his steps? It turns out that mathematicians have been trying to figure out this problem for about 100 years. The problem is so well-known that it even has a name: "The Travelling Salesman Problem".
It turns out that nobody has yet solved the "Travelling Salesman Problem", not even with the fastest computers on earth, because there are so many different arrangements to check. But Father Christmas is really clever , so we decided that he has established out the best possible path to take.
Now we have to work out how far the average distance was going to be from one household to the next. After all, some people live in apartment buildings. Other people live spread out on farms. And of course, Father Christmas needs to cross oceans as well.
(Can use average of 10m as it makes for easy maths, or make it harder depending on level)
Now we know how many stops he has to make, and the distance between each one, how far will he have to travel?
(If using 10m, 2.36 million kilometers, or about 1.4 million miles)
Introduce daylight saving with time a map of the world such as
www.custom-counter.com/resim.php?resim=http%3Asydaby.eget.net/swe/pics/time_zones.jpg&title=world%20time%20gmt%3A%20gullu
Work out how long he has to travel round the world from first dusk on Christmas eve to sunrise on Christmas day
(almost 40 hours)
Since speed is equal to distance divided by time, use the distance Father Christmas has to travel and divide it by the time he has in hours to gain his speed in an hour.
Devise a way to find his speed per minute and per second
(10 miles per second ? use example of local 10 mile distance to consolidate)
Now use the number of stops he has to make divided by the time he has in hours to find how many stop Father Christmas has to make every hour. Then do as above and find the number of stop he has to make every minute and second.
(depending on figures you used, about 1600 stops per second)