Numeracy Week - 8th-12th February 2010 - Part 1

The last week of the first half of Spring Term was Numeracy Week. The weather threatened to spoil the celebrations,
but unlike last year, it didn’t. We endured the bad weather and all the events took place as planned.
The offer was rich and reached a good number of students. We had guests and competitions, did the Maths walk and
displays about the book ‘The curious incident of the dog in the night time’ and visited Hayes Primary School among
many other things. Many people were involved and we would like to thank everyone for their help and support.
We are biased but the general feeling we had from the students was excitement. To confirm, or not, our impressions,
we would like to receive your comments. As a parent or a teacher of a student that might have participated in one of
the events, it is important for us to know what the impact of this week was on them. Did they tell you all about it? Are
they asking questions about something that they did?
As our menu was long and so many people were involved, we have a lot to tell. So for that reason we tell all about it in
small and weekly doses.
Talk – Ryan Flynn – Maths in the real life - On 11th February we welcomed Ryan Flynn, a Principal Lecture in the School
of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Greenwich. We invited him to speak to some of our
Year 10 students about the use of Maths in the gaming and computing industry. Ryan talked about the University of
Greenwich and the observatory, the Maths or Applied Maths that was once developed there and the Applied Maths
being developed now. He told us about the important projects related with simulators and fire safety before going
on to show some of the first video games, the maths within them and how they evolved to the latest technology. The
feedback was mixed, but for the students interested in the topic the talk was very positive. Ryan will possibly return
later in the year to run workshops in this topic.
‘I thought the talk was quite interesting because I am interested in designing games. It made me see that it involves Maths
and that Maths isn’t always boring. It opened up my options for A-level and University’ Annie, Year 10
‘I really liked the talk. I also learnt about the University itself. The fact that behind simple and complex programs, Maths
is what makes everything work. I was fascinated that you could control the actions of small programmed people through
Maths software which could be used to save lives.’ Elaine, Year 10
‘I thought it was an interesting speech which put an interesting spin on Maths. However I thought that much of it seemed to
be about the University. Overall it was a good use of time and very interesting, informative speech.’ Sebastian, Year 1