World Maths Day March 1st 2011

World Maths Day is being celebrated on Tuesday March 1st 2011. It is an event that has been run for the last four years and is the largest event across the world for people doing maths. The aim is for mathematicians of all backgrounds, nationalities, abilities and ages to compete in a fun interactive maths competition to raise money for UNICEF to promote education for all children across the world. The event is freely available online to any students, teachers or parents that would like to register, www.worldmathsday.com.

The competition element of the day is that participants can collect points by answering maths questions, preferably being sponsored to do so, during the day when it is the1st March anywhere in the world - a period of about 36 hours. In 2009 almost two million students from 204 countries correctly answered 452,681,681 questions during the event – a record the organisers hope to break this year. The competition is about making the world a smaller place and educating students about other countries and cultures as well as having fun doing maths. As a way of reflecting this, each country has a designated ambassador to promote the competition. The emphasis is very much on making maths exciting and raising awareness of how essential maths is to everyday life and work, with the aim being to get people as involved in maths as they are with sport. So why not try to get your pupils to join in the fun too?

I fully support the publicity and enthusiasm that a World Maths Day brings but also believe that maths should be engaging and interesting every day of the year, with a raised awareness of the essential skills and how maths is used in a great variety of careers. The world wouldn’t go round if we didn’t have skilled mathematicians, but we all need to be numerate in our day-to-day life too. The National STEM Centre eLibrary aims to provide teachers with free access to resources that will inspire and engage students so that they can see that maths in the classroom can be fun. The eLibrary has a vast range of resources covering activities for group work from the Standard Unit Box, videos showing how ideas from lessons link to the world of work and interactive resources like the Cyclic Quadrilateral tool from Nrich, all provided with full teacher’s notes on how best to use them. There are over 550 maths resources already in the eLibrary, covering age groups 5 to 19, and further new resources are being added on a daily basis.