This activity from the Nuffield Foundation shows students how to use Kruskal’s and Prim’s algorithms to solve minimum connector problems. A cable TV company wants to lay cables to connect the towns, laying the cable along the roads shown on a map of the Isle of Wight. They want to connect all of these towns to...

The application of probability, together with combinatorics, is the focus of this A level resource, from the Centre for Innovation in Mathematical Teaching. The 2008 draw for the Champions League provides data for students to investigate the probabilities of English teams being drawn against each other and to...

This chapter in the booklet Relevant and Engaging Statistics and Data Handling from the Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education (RSSCSE) describes the steps needed to both take and use random samples of real data from the CensusAtSchool website. In addition it offers some ideas to allow students...

From the Integrating Mathematical Problem Solving project by Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), this activity for post-16 students demonstrates that the acidity of a solution depends on the number of hydrogen ions per litre; the number of hydrogen ions per litre varies so much that a logarithmic scale is...

In this activity from the Nuffield Foundation students use the Chinese postman algorithm, also called the Route Inspection Problem, to solve practical problems. The College Open Day problem provides an introduction to the concept, and asks students to investigate the minimum distance someone would have to travel to...

Three advanced level lesson ideas from Susan Wall designed to explore the properties of circles and their equations. Each activity is accompanied by teacher notes suggesting how the activity could be delivered and possible extension ideas. The first activity requires students to match the equations of circles to...

In this resource students are required to use moving averages to investigate evidence for trends in local temperature change. There are links to the very real political and scientific debates regarding the question of climate change.

Climate Change Overview This brief overview makes...

The Nuffield Foundation provides this activity which students use to create spreadsheets that model what would happen to the temperature of the Earth if there were to be a sudden change in the amount of radiation entering or leaving the planet. Students then investigate polynomial and exponential functions to find...

The Nuffield Foundation provides this resource which shows students how, given a set of measurements along an irregular coastline, it is possible to approximate the area of land which is lost to coastal erosion over a period of time. Coastal erosion A - this activity uses the context of coastal erosion to introduce...

From the Integrating Mathematical Problem Solving project by Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), this activity shows how compound interest can be calculated over different intervals. As the intervals get smaller and smaller, the total value approaches a limit. Topic areas covered are:
• Use of...

During the statistics course, students will meet a range of different methods of hypothesis testing, all slightly different. The aim of this matching exercise is for students to create a table giving a variety of examples of situations in which a test may take place, the type of test which should be used in each...

Seven RISP activities covering a range of topics, each one having some activity which explores coordinate geometry.

Circle Property:...

In this resource students deal with the problem of administering doses of a prescribed drug so that the body does not have too little or an excess of the drug. An understanding of half life is required. Students do not need to use more complicated formulae for...

The objectives of this activity are to develop a chain of reasoning and to understand the application of mathematical induction to proving divisibility. Students are given a set of cards. The cards have to be arranged in such a manner that they form the solution to a problem together with justification for their...

This activity from the Nuffield Foundation shows students how to use a recurrence relation to work out how long it takes to pay off a credit card loan and how much it costs. They can use a graphic calculator or spreadsheet to do the working. After working through the given example, where a customer spends £1250 and...