An honourable mention to the maths/cartoon website.

Thrice (there's a word you don't often type) weekly comics at the www.xkcd.com 

An occasionally update blog at blag.xkcd.com. Some very interesting post on a variety of mathematical concepts, probability, sequences and public protocol, and advanced trigonometrical dating strategies.

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.

Very occasionally I stumble across a puzzle that is so simple to comprehend and yet so hard to solve.

The Resolving Mac Mahon problem using Dotnet problem is such a puzzle. Since reading it this morning my head has been buzzing with ideas.

One of the missing pages that has been removed which I'm rather fond of has can now be found here: Pythag.html

I remember reading somewhere that the 13^th of each month is more likely to be a Friday than any other day.

So I decided to test this and calculated which day of the week the 13^th falls on. I didn't see any statistical anomalies for the first say 1000 months. But when I cranked up the counter to 20000 months, we can definitely see something.

I started counting from the 13^th January 2000. The last 20000 months takes us well into the next millenium. Nevertheless whoever invented the Friday 13^th bad luck rumour could have checked the figures and gone for Saturday 13^th instead. Not only would we have less bad luck, but also we could stay in bed longer.