MATHEMATICS/

NUMERACY

Moments in Mathematics

Junior School

When working through geometry we are lucky to have a vast history of knowledge to lean on. We’ve all heard of Pi (π), that number that starts with 3.14 followed by a never-ending list of decimal values. It’s even celebrated on March 14th! But what is it and why is it so special? By definition, Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (we can thank Archimedes for this discovery), and having this knowledge allows us to calculate a wide variety of information about circles and circular shapes. But its usefulness doesn’t just end with geometry – Pi can also be found or used in many situations such as when investigating harmonic progressions, topology, and in applications of calculus. On the BSC Open Night students were invited to add to a Pi-Paper-Chain where each number is a different colour. Our Year 7 ELHES class continued with this project, managing to get to the 80th value of Pi (see images). Recreating Pi in this visual way gives a practical demonstration of how long the value is and that it continues indefinitely, and also shows how often each of the different numbers are represented.

Senior School

The first Annual Roller Coaster Design Competition has been completed! Students from year 10 Enrichment Maths classes used their knowledge of linear – and some non-linear – equations and graphs to put together their designs, and stretched their creative minds by creating engineering schematics for some very exciting possible new roller coasters (see images). Which ones would you be brave enough to ride?

Family Fun

We hope you had a restful holiday break and enjoyed the origami challenge! Here are some more riddles to get your brain working again this term. Answers will be revealed in the next edition of Highlights.

- A little girl goes to the store and buys one dozen eggs and, as she is going home, all but three break. How many eggs are left unbroken?

- If you buy a rooster for the purpose of laying eggs and you expect to get three eggs each day for breakfast, how many eggs will you have after three weeks?