The aim of the route inspection problem is to find a route that is as short as possible yet goes down every road once and returns to the starting point. The task informs students that there has been a heavy snowfall overnight and that the students are required to clear the roads in the town centre as quickly as...

This Nuffield Advanced Mathematics option consists of six units of work, each on a different theme. Students had the opportunity, as part of their coursework, to develop an aspect of interest from one of the themes into a longer project. These topics were chosen to...

This resource presents four Fermi problems, or back-of-the-envelope calculations, based on a video about an underwater volcano disaster.  Students are expected to develop experience of using quantitative reasoning techniques and gain an...

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...

The Top, Side and Front views of shapes are given. The challenge is to make the shapes using cubes. As an extension, 3D representations of the shapes can be drawn on isometric paper. This resource is suitable for Key Stage 3 and could be used as an extension of the topic of 2D representations of 3D shapes.

This student facing information sheet explains the term 'ethical research', why it is important and what pupils undertaking an Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) need to consider in this area when undertaking research which uses an experiment, survey or observational study. It guides students through a series of...

In this activity developed by the Institute of Physics, students use simple diffraction gratings to observe the spectra from different sources, and deduce how scientists can work out which chemicals are present in an exoplanet’s atmosphere. When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, some of the starlight is...

Outlier tester is a very simple but fun spreadsheet that gives students the chance to explore the definition of an outlier using the interquartile range to determine the values beyond which outliers fall. Sheet two provides definitions for determining where outliers fall. By manipulating the outlier values and/or...

The family tree for honeybees is given together with rules for reproduction. The challenge begins with identification of male and female bees in a diagram. Further rows are then added and the information collected in a table. There is an extension to then find the number of bees in other generations without drawing...

This activity gives pupils the opportunity to explore MRI imaging, developing their understanding of what it does, why it is useful and what it is like to have a scan. The resources also wants to support pupils to develop a positive disposition about MRI imaging. The activities include pupils being able to make...

Published by BEAM, this activity requires students to write different number sequences with the number eight in the middle of the sequence. The exercise consists of sequences consisting of five numbers but could be started with three numbers and extended to sequences with more than five numbers. There is also an...

Inspired by the Born to Engineer video from Faye Banks, an engineer who works on the UK electrical network, this resource supports students to increase their understanding of engineering and the design decisions that electrical engineers have to make when creating a new electrical network.

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This week's activity continues to use a fakebot (a printed or drawn Beebot) to create numbers. 
Many of the concepts and approaches built into this lesson support computational thinking (problem solving):
• They use decomposition to break down the numerals into sections, making it easier to write the...

This activity, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, looks at Hubble’s law, whereby students use real data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to plot a graph from which they can obtain the Hubble constant. Students then look at the possible sources of error in their data and use this to calculate the uncertainty in...