William Billy Black needs your help to work out how many cakes to put on each table at the various events he’s catering for. It’s an exercise in forming and solving equations. They get progressively more difficult and my initial thoughts is that I wouldn’t do it all at once but in three parts.

Disarm the bombs by typing in the code that requires Bidmas to find the answers. I admit it, I came up with the name first.

This help William 'Billy' Black calculate how much grease-proof paper he needs plus how much each cake tine can hold. The shapes go from cuboids to a cylinder to a hemisphere to a frustum, so you can start and finish where you like.

The usual story but with some Bidmas/Bodmas questions. If you’ve not seen these before then the students must answer the questions correctly in order to know the order in which to defuse the bomb.

Name the properties and formulae for volume and surface area with Disco Stu from The Simpsons who is partial to throwing some shapes on the dancefloor.

Various probability problems that help you defuse the infamous terrorist The Mathematician’s bomb. All self-explanatory and useful for a plenary or ‘Prove it’ activity.

From a link on Twitter (thank you @beetlebug1) I put together this as an activity to describe the trends in sales in the music industry. This involves predictions too and should get students to read the pie charts carefully, seeing how statistics are used in a context they are familiar with.

I did this as a total coverage of histograms - hope it's of some use.

Using average and range convince me that Steven Spielberg should direct my biopic. This combines a bit of literacy too, but should get them using averages to explain their reasoning.

Increasingly difficult questions from D grade up to A grade and with a 'Red, Amber, Green' table to fill in their progress. I've said that it can be used at KS3 as well, because I reckon that they will figure out the tougher stuff. (One mistake now corrected.)

Using the characters from Prison Break Season 1 (trailer is included) you have to narrow down the search area for the authorities. Maps are provided. There are seven to catch.

Describe and complete the transformations for the following potraits from the cast of Toy Story.

I found the 'Research' section on the Sport England website and noticed that their graphs and charts are more aesthetically focused than useful. I therefore came up with this. There's loads of useful stuff on the website (which is hyperlinked in the powerpoint), especially the infographics bit in 'Who Plays Sport?'.

The labels and thermostats on their new costumes have been mixed up so they need to convert Celcius to Fahrenheit and vice versa to see if the suits will withstand the temperatures they produce. It's simple substitution basically.

Fenton the dog likes chasing deer and geese through Richmond Park (the original video from YouTube is included in the Notebook file). The Rangers need to calculate the number of distressed animals there are as a result of the chases using the total number of feet chased and the total number of animals.

Calculate how many villains Captain America has to fight in certain rooms of the three 'House of Horrors', plus the rule rule (nth term) he uses to make this calculation. Ideal for KS3 and GCSE maths students.

A mathematician's Christmas tree has to be decorated using transformations. Can you fully describe them?

Help secret agent Jim Pond get soke important documents from arch enemy Ernest Stavros Blowfield by solving the cluess to their whereabouts.

Calculate the points I'd score by destroying these pigs and then calculate the formulae for calculating the total score. It's designed to make algebra more relevent. Smart board file to save printing once more!

KS2 / KS3 Maths. This is simple rotation and writing coherent instructions using Pacman as a model. It is designed to be an introduction to rotation and transformations.