This Core Maths task looks at how countries are ranked at the 2012 Olympic Games. Students use Excel to order the data and are asked to comment on whether the ranking is fair. This activity is designed to then lead to a discussion of weighted rankings.

The teachers' notes give...

This Core Maths task provides an opportunity for students to create questions based on the idea of someone being awarded a certificate for traveling one million miles with an airline. Students are to decide what information they need to help them answer their questions and then to work out the...

These O.R. Society resources contain seven short films explaining what operational research is, how it is used in a variety of every day situations and what career opportunities the study of operational research affords. The sub collection contains problems to be used to introduce, practice or consolidate a variety...

A case study from Mathematics Matters which looks at the development of optical fibres and how mathematical models have simplified the process of producing them. Modern society relies heavily on a variety of networks, but we don’t fully understand how they behave. Mathematical network theory lets us create models...

Department for Education Standards Unit Improving Learning in Mathematics 'Other' materials provide activities to explore the properties of graph in decision mathematics, the equations of motion and solving problems using Newton's second law.

This article, from the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM) publication ‘Mathematics Teaching’, is taken from MT217.

Jenni Ingram and Robert Ward-Penny give their thoughts on classrooms today by examining the variety of activities that can be seen in the mathematics classroom. Students are frequently...

This guide arises from the More Maths Grads project, and it is intended to show what has worked in the project. It provides some evidence of that success in the form of comments from students and their teachers, and gives examples of what might be done. It shares experiences of how to find suitable partners and...

This resource allows students to use a spreadsheet to explore the mean annual temperature of Oxford since 1815. 

Investigating a large data set instructs students to find data from a given website and then use moving averages to investigate possible trends. 

A brief guide to...

The Nuffield Foundation provides this activity where students suggest types of function to model ozone hole data, before using a graphic calculator or spreadsheet to find at least two particular models. They then consider how well their functions model the data and what they predict for the future. The slideshow...

This excel resource looks at various methods of evaluating pi, including Vièta’s formula and using the trapezium rule.

The first series of sheets include an introduction to François Vièta, his infinite product for...

This optimisation problem is an ideal opportunity to use the real-world context of logistics as an application of first fit, first fit decreasing and full bin algorthims.

In this activity students have to decide how to pack a number of items into the least number of parcels possible, within certain...

This optimisation problem is an ideal opportunity to use the real-world context of logistics as an application of a first fit decreasing algorthim.

In this activity students have to decide how to cut pieces of wood to make a shelving unit using the least number of planks of wood, within certain constraints....

This optimisation problem is an ideal opportunity to use the real-world context of logistics as an application of first fit algorthims.

In this activity students have to allocate a number of different jobs to different employees within certain constraints. As part of the task students are introduced to first...

This Operational Research (OR) Society resource  invites students to analyse processes and efficiencies through a series of group challenges.

In the first activity students are asked to produce as many cups as possible by folding paper. Students are also asked to calculate the mean, variance and standard...

This group task asks students to design, build, evaluate and test paper planes.

The presentation outlines the expected outcomes and also contains teacher notes. It includes a link to a six minute BBC video about the design features involved when making paper planes.