Five RISP starters revise ideas of polynomials and curve-sketching, cover expanding brackets, solving equations graphically, and knowing how to sketch the graphs of curves.

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This resource, from the Royal Institution, provides students with the opportunity to explore the formation of a parabola through a paper folding activity. Students follow a set of simple instructions which describe how to fold a piece of A4 paper and are asked to describe what shape is produced. The activity is...

Histogram reconstruction is an activity designed to enable students to gain a deeper understanding of frequency density and how it is used in the construction of a histogram.

Students cut out bars from a rectangle with which students construct three histograms using the clues given in three partially...

The premise of this activity is that the school is sending a rover to Mars. Its mission is to search for evidence that life has ever existed there. It is the job of the class to decide where the rover should land on Mars. They will do this by working in groups and investigating six potential landing sites and...

Standards Unit: Improving Learning in Mathematics activities to support the learning of decision and mechanics. The 'Active Learning' session plans including starting points, processes and photocopiable resources.

Materials

* Moving from Eulerian graphs to the route inspection (Chinese postman)...

The Nuffield Foundation provides this activity which can be used to review students' knowledge of the derivatives of quadratic and cubic functions and their graphs. The slideshow provides an introduction by considering a quadratic example and a cubic example.

This RISP activity introduces the subject of differentiation. Rather than start from first principles or learning a rule, the activity suggests using a graphing package to generate data. Starting with a quadratic graph, students find the gradient of the curve using a straight line graph and are encouraged arrive at...

Two Special Cubes...

In this activity, students are given a Venn diagram and asked to find eight different probability distributions, one for each of the eight regions in the Venn diagram. The notes give solutions for the regions that are possible.

This resource is part of the Making Stats Vital collection from Jonny Griffiths...

In this activity students consider a population growth problem which leads to a power series. The presentation can be used to introduce the topic and use of spreadsheets would enable students to model and draw graphs of the situation.

From the Integrating Mathematical Problem Solving project by Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), this activity shows how changing the price of a product changes the demand so putting the price up can reduce income. Modelling helps decision making. The mathematical ideas covered are:
• Percentage...

This activity can be used to provide a simple introduction to the technique of Fermi estimation. The three files contain an overview, teacher notes and a student handout.

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The many applications of mechanics make it an important topic of interest to applied mathematicians, scientists and engineers. This resource, produced by the Centre for Teaching Mathematics at the University of Plymouth, is designed to provide a more realistic view of mechanics and help the teaching of mechanics...

This resource, produced by the Centre for Teaching Mathematics at the University of Plymouth, is designed to provide short problems to stimulate discussion of mathematics amongst A level students and between students and their teachers; and to provide some longer investigations which search more deeply into the...

This resource, produced by the Centre for Teaching Mathematics at the University of Plymouth, is designed to provide a series of short problems to stimulate discussion of statistics amongst students and between students and teachers; and to provide some longer investigations which search more deeply into the...