This article is designed to help teachers feel more confident in their work with STEM Ambassadors to further enhance enrichment activities. Skills shortages in Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths (STEM) and the Built Environment are well documented, and will continue to be an issue whether people are in a period of recession or recovery. The…

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) can take many forms. It may arise through individual endeavours, collaborative working with others within a school or professional network, or it may be supported by external expertise. In science, there has been development of CPD that "enthuses, inspires" and illustrates "impact", through expansion of…

In this article, the authors describe the first Festival of Contemporary Science for Science Teachers which was held in January 2010. Focusing on a number of leading-edge science topics, this new festival was organised by Bristol ChemLabS, in collaboration with the Science Learning Centre South West, and involved academics from several departments…

For anyone who has wondered about how creativity looks in practice, this article offers a picture of how creativity can be a powerful force in the classroom. The author provides three examples illustrating some alternatives that he has developed that work with pupils and teachers in many countries all over the world. The magic bucket activity…

This article adopts the following classification for a Euclidean planar [triangle]ABC, purely based on angles alone. A Euclidean planar triangle is said to be acute angled if all the three angles of the Euclidean planar [triangle]ABC are acute angles. It is said to be right angled at a specific vertex, say B, if the angle ?ABC is a right angle…

Over the past decade, many researchers have discussed the effectiveness of clickers and their potential to change the way we teach and interact with students. Although most of the literature revolves around elementary usage of clickers, the deeper questions of how to integrate this technology into teaching are largely unanswered. In this paper, we…

In this article we highlight how a simple classroom activity associated with the dissection of rectangles into right-angled triangles can lead on to a number of interesting explorations for students following a post-16 mathematics course. Several results connected with this construction are obtained, and some of the educational benefits of…

This article could be of interest to teachers of applied mathematics as well as to people who are interested in applications of linear algebra. We give a comprehensive study of linear systems from an application point of view. Specifically, we give an overview of linear systems and problems that can occur with the computed solution when the…

We present background and an activity meant to show both instructors and students that mere button pushing with technology is insufficient for success, but that additional thought and preparation will permit the technology to serve as an excellent tool in the understanding and learning of mathematics. (Contains 5 figures.)

This article presents a few methods for generating Sudoku puzzles. These methods are developed based on the concepts of matrix, permutation, and modular functions, and therefore can be used to form application examples or student projects when teaching various mathematics courses. Mathematical properties of these methods are studied, connections…

Linear algebra has become one of the most useful fields of mathematics since last decade, yet students still have trouble seeing the connection between some of the abstract concepts and real-world applications. In this article, we propose the use of thought-provoking questions in lesson designs to allow two-way communications between instructors…

This article presents the importance of using multimedia in the math classes by an example of multimedia lesson about definite integral and the results of the research carried out among the students of the first years of faculty, divided into two groups of 25. One group had the traditional lecture about the definite integral, while the other one…

This note uses the analytic notion of asymptotic functions to study when a function is asymptotic to a polynomial function. Along with associated existence and uniqueness results, this kind of asymptotic behaviour is related to the type of asymptote that was recently defined in a more geometric way. Applications are given to rational functions and…

The aim of this study is twofold. The first is to investigate the ability of secondary school students to understand the different distribution schemes and thus, indirectly, to contribute to the educational discussion and approach to be used for distribution problems so as to lessen reliance on the ubiquitous cross-multiplication rule in…

The prevalence of prediction in grade-level expectations in mathematics curriculum standards signifies the importance of the role prediction plays in the teaching and learning of mathematics. In this article, we discuss benefits of using prediction in mathematics classrooms: (1) students' prediction can reveal their conceptions, (2) prediction…