mathematics | OpenSTEM Pty Ltd

Welcome Back!

Well, most of our schools are back, or about to start the new year. Did you know that there are schools using OpenSTEM materials in every state and territory of Australia? Our wide range of resources, especially those on Australian history, give detailed information about the history of all our states and territories. We pride ourselves on having a resource on every topic in the Australian HASS and Science curriculum for primary school, so if you find something that you think is missing, please let us know and if it’s not there already, it soon will be!

This year we are preparing a new suite of Understanding Our World® HASS + Science Units for anyone who wants a bit of variety. If you are interested, do let us know and we might even be able to give you a sneak preview. Remember, all our Understanding Our World units run for 9 weeks per term, giving a bit of leeway for those crazy early weeks of the year!

There will also be some new resources coming out, and some substantial updates to some more familiar resources. Much of our material has been updated for the new year already, so make sure that you update your copies, especially with the 2018 licensed material.

Last year, after requests from some of the teachers we work with, OpenSTEM® started developing resources to assist with the Maths curriculum. Our Diced Maths® resources have been so popular that some students have even asked if they could swap from computer-based Maths programs to the Diced Maths resources! Students report that these resources make them feel more in control of their own learning and love “playing” with the funky dice. Many don’t see the activities as “doing Maths” at all. These activities develop students’ problem solving skills, whilst practising all their basic Maths concepts and operations at the same time.

Stay tuned for some exciting specials coming up in the next few weeks, as well as some more in depth exploration into a range of topics.

Maths Challenge (Basic Operations)

As we are working on expanding our resources in the Maths realm, we thought it would be fun to start a little game here.

Remember “Letters and Numbers” on SBS? (Countdown in UK, Cijfers en Letters in The Netherlands and Belgium, originally Des Chiffres et des Lettres in France).

The core rules for numbers game are: you get 6 numbers, to use with basic operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide) to get as close as possible to a three digit target number. You can only use each number once, but you don’t have to use all numbers. No intermediate result is allowed to be be negative or contain a fraction. Positive integers only, all the way.

Now try this for practice:

Your 6 numbers (4 small, 2 large): 1 9 6 9 25 75

Your target: 316

We’re not worrying about a time limit, as it’s about the problem solving.

If you want, comment on this post with your solution (full working)!

George Boole Bicentenary Celebrations

Today is George Boole‘s 200th birthday. He lived from 2 November 1815 to 8 December 1864, so he was only 49 when he died!

In 2015, University College Cork (Ireland) celebrates the bicentenary of George Boole’s birth. Born in Lincoln, Boole was a mathematical genius who was largely self-taught. His appointment as the first Professor of Mathematics at the college in 1849 provided the opportunity to develop his most important work, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.

Boole is a pivotal figure who can be described as the ‘father of the information age’. His invention of Boolean algebra and symbolic logic pioneered a new mathematics. His legacy surrounds us everywhere, in the computers, information storage and retrieval, electronic circuits and controls that support life, learning and communications in the 21st century.

Check out the georgeboole.com site for video and lots more information about George Boole and his wonderful achievements!

Press coverage for OpenSTEM Robotics Program at Grovely State School

A journalist and photographer from Brisbane’s North-West News visited Grovely State School, providing this very nice write-up. This is a great acknowledgement of all the work and achievements by the students in the senior classes on electronics soldering, robotics and programming!

It’s been fabulous working with the students and staff at Grovely, and everybody is having a great time – almost forgetting that the OpenSTEM Robotics Program is real curriculum related school work rather than just an incursion experience!

Serendipitously, the Queensland government has recently announced an intention to focus specifically on programming and robotics in education:

“Our goal is to make sure our students are at the cutting edge of innovation through the development of skills to become the technology architects of the digital age,” Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said, “This will include an assessment of coding and computer science, as well as early stage robotics, something I firmly believe should be a part of our education system.”

— ‘Advance Queensland’ package announcement (July 2015)

We’d love to work with your school too, contact us today! We’re currently accepting expressions of interest for the second half of Term 4 (2015) and 2016, and we’re also happy to visit you to meet and discuss your ideas and needs. We love our Robotics Program, but we do much more!

Queensland Junior Physics Olympiad 2015

The QLD Junior Physics Olympiad (known to the participants as JPhO) is an annual winter school holiday event at the University of Queensland, this year running in the week of 29 June – 3 July, for year 10 students with an interest in science and mathematics.

Knowing people who have participated, and as a parent, I can say it’s an absolutely awesome program. I am specifically telling you this now because there appear to be one or two student places still available for this year’s Olympiad!

So, if you’re a parent or teacher of a year 10 student who has an interest in physics, rush to the link and get things sorted with the organisers! You want to be really quick and convincing as officially the closing date for applications was May 1st and the Olympiad is definitely going ahead anyway.

Discrete Maths by Tim Berglund

This presentation was by Tim Berglund at OSCON 2013 (Portland, Oregon USA). Tim explores the branch of mathematics that deals with separate, countable things. Most of the math we learn in school deals with real-valued quantities like mass, length, and time. However, much of the work of the software developer deals with counting, combinations, numbers, graphs, and logical statements: the purview of discrete mathematics. Watch this brief exploration of an often-overlooked but eminently practical area of mathematics.