9464
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2012-09-20T15:54:00
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<p>We also work with teachers and school leaders in various professional development capacities - conferences, school based CPD and research projects. You can find out more about our CPD activity <a href="http://nrich.maths.org/8515">here</a>.</p>
<h4>What is a problem?</h4>
Problems can have one or more purposes:
<ul>
<li>some are designed to encourage pupils to develop mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills by applying their knowledge to novel, interesting and challenging situations,</li>
<li>some problems offer opportunities to learn some new mathematics as learners work through the problem-solving process,</li>
<li>others require problem solvers to bring together a range of mathematical ideas and techniques in order to make progress.</li>
</ul>
Many of the problems on the site have the capacity to be extended well beyond the basic task and should be seen as a starting point for maths investigation and discovery. The teacher resources are an essential read for ideas on their potential use in the classroom.
<br></br>
Most of our problems are designed to meet the needs of pupils from 5 to 19, although we have just started to add activities at either end of that age range, ie for really young children and undergraduates.<br></br>
Our tasks are grouped together in Collections. These groupings are determined by:
<ul>
<li>mathematical content</li>
<li>and mathematical process</li>
<li>and type of activity ( problem, game, article)</li>
<li>and age range</li>
<li>and other specialist or age specific titles, such as STEM</li>
</ul>
which means that any one task might appear in several Collections.<br></br>
At any time you visit the site we will be featuring several Collections and a small number of problems from each of those will be Open for Solutions. We don't include solutions to problems when they are first published but we do encourage students to send us their solutions. We edit and publish extracts from them later. The closing date for these will be advertised and we will collate the entries
and publish them shortly after the closing date.<br></br>
<h4>Which problems are for my students?</h4>
A good starting point is the age range of your students. Our problems are grouped into lower and upper primary, lower and upper secondary and of course you may wish to look at problems for the grouping above and below your own.<br></br>
<strong>What do the stars mean?</strong><br></br>
Since many of our problems on the site have the capacity to be extended well beyond the basic task (we call these <a href="http://nrich.maths.org/7701">low threshold, high ceiling</a>), the stars indicate the point of entry of the problem. They don't however indicate how far you can go! <br></br>
* Easy to get started with, although often very rich<br></br>
** Harder to get started, but again often very rich<br></br>
*** Very challenging problems - difficult or involved.<br></br>
<h4><br></br>
What's in a game?</h4>
Most of our games are strategy games. Many of them double up as consolidation activities. Through others your students may learn something new. You can read more about why we think games are cool <a href="http://nrich.maths.org/7701">here</a>.<br></br>
<h4>What articles will I find?</h4>
Our articles are for teachers and older pupils. Some are about mathematical ideas, some are about the history of mathematics, and others are about the pedagogy of teaching a particular topic or idea. We often work with <a href="http://nrich.maths.org/8326">guest editors</a> who write a short article explaining the philosophy or research that underpins the activities we have devised with their
help.<br></br>
<strong>Finding what you're looking for...</strong><br></br>
If you know the name of an activity, type it into the search box.<br></br>
If you want an activity on a particular topic, we've put together Collections on mathematical topics and processes, mapped to the Curriculum Mapping documents. They're at the right hand top of the teacher pages.<br></br>
Go to past features for our favourite selections<br></br>
Go to past issue for monthly themes from the old site<br></br>
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Many teachers find it useful to <a href="http://nrich.maths.org/public/mailinglist.php">register for our regular Newsletter</a> to keep up to date with our latest news.<br></br>
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