In #mathstoday (yesterday), Y12 Further Maths tried to fool each other by writing what they thought a run of Heads/Tails could look like, then doing a real one. They were very good at detecting fake randomness!

In #mathstoday with Y12 we looked at suspended moments. They often struggle to visualise what these look like, so we looked at the tension in the ‘strings’ as well as the point of tilting.

Reading ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ in the glorious sunshine, I was amused to find this among the list of H G Wells’ short stories:

Just the contents page gave me chills…

In #MathsToday we first calculated FMax by raising the slope to the point of sliding, then set up a situation with a pulley where pupils calculated the amount of mass to add to the hanging end to pull the mass up the slope (to the nearest 0.1kg). Very satisfying to see!

Set up another pulley situation in #mathstoday with Y12. Spent the whole lesson modelling, checking, refining the model to work out tension, acceleration, total distance travelled. I think they understand the questions better if they’ve seen it first and work through the process.

In #mathstoday with L6, we looked at pulley problems. Thanks to the physics department we could create some of the problems to see how accurate the models were and discuss assumptions.

In #mathstoday I ran out of room on the whiteboard and only managed to just squeeze parts a) and b) from a past paper question 😂

A spot of last-minute surtitling on a Friday evening!