Question have arrived, a very nice investigative piece on what numbers can be written as a difference of two squares. Had some fun playing with this problem on the last lesson on Friday:

Which integers can be expressed as a difference of two squares (x²-y²), and which of these can be expressed as a difference of two squares in more than one way.

Took less than an hour to derive a convincing argument. It's always fun to introduce modulo arithmetic. Particularly square numbers and modulo 4.

We've recently run a mock exam in school, and I wanted to do some heavier analysis on the scores than simply comparing a student against the average.

What I wanted was to see how a student performed on a question by question basis and also to know what areas needed reinforcing. What I've done in the past is to enter all the results into an Excel spreadsheet, and then manipulate this data. Sadly this was going to be too heavy and admin task. So I asked the students to help and got them to enter their results into a google form.

Google forms allow you to easily create a questionnaire and distribute that to a number of students, more useful is that the data entry is multi-user so all your students can do it in one go.

You can see my first experiment with the technology in a simple question and answer form

http://sites.google.com/site/jeremiahmaths/datablog-questions

 

 

Here's a problem I've been meaning to put up for a long while - it was sent to me from a good friend a few years ago. The problem is explained in the following image. BTW AD=AB, so it's a square.

 

 

SPOILERS:

Click this link to view the geogebra version of this problem. [345.html (4.50 kb)] 

So the first post is simply a repost of something I've done else where, I can now stick this on here. It's simply a monopoly simulation written for students who wished to find the most frequented spot on a monopoly board.

On a side note and thinking about a more simple scenario, if you are playing snakes and ladders and there's a ladder on square 6 on the board, what the probability of going up this ladder?

Think again if you're sticking with 1/6.

So it's been a really long time since this site saw any activity and I must admit I've started to feel guilty about it all, thus it's time for a new start. Out goes dasBlog and in comes BlogEngine.Net

Not a great deal has happened since the last post - I'm still happily teaching mathematics. However, what's changed in recent times is that education blogging seems to be catching up with what happened to tech blogging at the start of the century.

What you will be seeing here are blog entries regarding maths and education in UK Secondary schools (11-18)

That's it for now - I'll be back soon with a few more entries.

I have a student in my A-Level maths course who is interested in pursuing a computer science degree.

I have suggested that they have a go at programming. Having very little experience of programming what would be a suitable type of project for them to attempt.

My initial thoughts are some numerical method, however, something more immediate and tangible maybe more applicable.

After many requests I've decided to release the source code to the multisite isapi extension.

If you wish please download the source code. Have fun with the code, it's given me months of enjoyment. Any problems, please get in touch in the usual manner.

Geetesh from Indiezine has just released an interview based around my flash extraction tool. It has raised an interesting point regarding the perceived security that one hase when bundling an object in an office document.

Remember that once you give away your files, you give away your files. It's as simple as that. Whatever security you wish to have you lose it as soon as you make it public. Just live with it.

Please read the Extract Flash article for more information.

At last what seems to be a throughly complete reference for URL rewriting in .Net

Tip/Trick: Url Rewriting with ASP.NET

Apparently today is "Windows Developer Tools Day" and because I contributed to the book of the same name, I've been asked to write an entry on my favourite free tool, how it has helped me.

I use a lot of free tools, it takes me ages to install them and as I don't really keep a list it's largely an organic process. However, the tool which really sticks out in my mind is Fiddler. Basically it's a proxy which sits on your machine and logs all HTTP traffic.

So why is this useful, well sometimes you really need to know exactly what is being sent from the server to the client, especially these AJAXY days when requests to the server can happen at any time. Not to mention the rise and rise of web services. All these requests get logged by Fiddler.

The time that really sticks out as a life saver was the development of a web service client windows application which in development and release worked 100% with site 1 however with site 2 the application crashed on every call to the web service. As the development environment was a long way away debugging was discounted so I launched Fiddler and had a listen. It logged the call out, and the return from the server. The BODY of the response was fine, however, when I looked at the HTTP Header there was something very wrong. It turned out there was an ISAPI Filter at site 2 which announced itself by including an invalid HTTP Header.

The filter wasn't necessary so we removed the filter and this removed the problem. Actually I believe that the error was being thrown from a third party component and so it would have been impossible to handle the error other than by fixing the HTTP Header.

So there we go enjoy the rest of "Windows Developer Power Tools" day.