A powerpoint to lead discussion introducing Pythagoras with Cuisenaire rods. A bit rough and ready / stream of consciousness in places but hopefully may be useful giving others some ideas / inspiration.

A “how many Xs can you fill from Y” and volume of a cuboid task in the context filling painting trays from tins of paint. Aimed at a Scottish N4 Applications of Mathematics (Geometry unit) class .

Worksheet and datasets for performing paired and independent t-tests on. All bar one of the datasets are based on real life sources.

A task which involves generating scatterplots and correlation coefficients using nutritional information from a McDonalds menu. Worksheet and csv dataset. Points of interest: Menu is from America leading to a discussion about how useful is it for use in UK High number of breakfast items and low number of burgers doesn’t reflect common perception of McD’s menu Sodium (ie salt) and calories have a strong correlation but this is a spurious relationship (salt has no calories) with portion size being a possible confounding variable

Two tasks: One calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient by hand. A right pain in the backside and shows why we use computers to do such a thing (worth noting doing this by hand is something that could be assessed if doing Level 6 Numeracy). One getting pupils used to coding the correlation coefficient using statistical software (using the attached csv dataset) and seeing what it means in terms of the regression line without context getting in the way.

Excuse the emotional whiplash of going from heights of sportsmen to the biggest maritime disasters in history but a few questions on performing z-tests. Includes a dataset to draw figures from for the sportmen question.

A set of tasks for pupils to pick and chose from working with square numbers, triangular numbers, Fibonacci numbers, and Pascal’s triangle. Some made up by me, some from various sources credited in the pdf attached.

This task focuses on what the averages look like rather than how to calculate them. This could be done with piles of blocks/cubes if you wish (though some of the means work out with decimal values). Inspired by the “mean average equal sharing” activity by Don Steward: Resources uploaded: PDF of resource Editable Excel spreadsheet of resource Don Sterward slides from above link

Answers included if you follow the link included on the last page to the Desmos graphing website. Inspired by Dave Taylor’s excellent set of resources on his Increasinly Difficult Questions website.

An increasingly difficult exercise on the nature of the roots of quadratics which can be solved with the skills taught at National 5 (though moves beyond the style of question the SQA would ask). Inspired by Dave Taylor’s Increasingly Difficult Questions website. Also included are a set of “basic” essential skills questions too (taken from the Free National 5 Maths website).

Question sheet and four datasets for use with appropriate statistical software. Adapted from a Don Steward task about bee colonies. Each question asks pupils to: plot a scatterplot calculate and interpret the correlation coefficient find the equation of the regression line interpret one or both of the equation parameters make a prediction using the regression line

Pupils use histograms and boxplots to illustrate various continuous numerical variables in RStudio using a csv dataset. Variables are values Spotify uses to categorise songs. Songs in the dataset and taken from a playlist. A bit of fun included asking pupils to pick some songs that would suit the tastes of the person who created the playlist (me!). If you use this and pupils make suggestions let me know on Twitter at @bucksburnmaths. To give pupils an idea of what tempo feels like I play them Juice by Lizzo which is 120 bpm. Also played them You Suffer by Napalm Death (1.3 seconds long) and Mogwai Fear Satan by Mogwai (16 minutes long) as a way of talking about outliers. Plus, any excuse to talk about the 1980s grindcore scene!

A handful of questions based on the National Insurance rates given in the 2024 data booklet.