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Inventive ways of explaining maths

1 reply

wanderings · 24/05/2019 07:13

Do you have ways of explaining or demonstrating maths (especially secondary maths) that are different from the technical explanation? I give a lot of one-to-one tuition in maths, and enjoy inventing my own questions, but I'm always looking for others.

A pupil told me how their teacher demonstrated the mundane topics of mean and standard deviation: a computer screen showing a large "count up" timer was placed on the teacher's desk, the pupils were told to close their eyes, to open them when they thought sixty seconds had passed, and to note the time. The mean and standard deviation were calculated. Then they did the experiment again, which showed a mean closer to sixty seconds, and a lower standard deviation, as the pupils got "better" at the task.

Of course, the above experiment wouldn't really work for a one-to-one lesson, but do you have inventive ways of explaining or demonstrating concepts (primary and secondary)?

OP posts:
cdtaylornats · 24/05/2019 07:46

An exercise in estimation.

Fill a bottle with jelly beans and hide a gob-stopper in the middle.

Have them write down on first sight the jelly beans in the bottle.

Later tell them the average dimensions of a jelly bean and the dimensions of the bottle, let them calculate the number of beans and write that down.

Count the beans while listening to the outrage about the gob-stopper.

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