Month: November 2019

You have probably seen something like this in your cup of tea (or coffee, I don’t discriminate) before:

I’ve written a very short activity that has a little bit of conversion between forms of graphs and introduces how to import a picture into Desmos that could easily be used in the classroom. It actually works surprisingly well using Desmos on a phone.

If you wish to use it please download from here: Tea Cup Cardioid

And if you want to know more of the physics and maths behind this I recommend this Chalkdust article from Dominika Vasilkova (@dragon_dodo) – it’s a great article!

This is a post to share something that may be useful for teachers of AQA Core Maths who have mocks coming up.

For the last couple of years I have made my own QLA analysers for Sixth Form mocks I have done, but I haven’t routinely made them for Core Maths. The main reason I do this is because I like to have a whole qualification in one file as opposed to different analysers for each paper.

I have now done so for the 2017 sitting of AQA Core Maths.

There is a main headline page that displays paper marks, calculates grades based on the option selected (I do both grades from the official boundaries published by AQA and also inflated boundaries where I add a few marks to each grade). On this page you also paste in your students’ names in to the top row.

As you can see above each paper then has a QLA page where question by question you enter the marks scored. On this page there is a brief description of the question topic, the maximum mark available and then space to enter data. This should all be validated and not allow you to enter a mark higher than the maximum mark available for a question, for example. The cells are then formatted on a sliding scale from red for 0 marks to green for full marks per question.

If you think this would be helpfully then the file can be downloaded here.

AQA Core Maths Analyser 2017

To help with some revision my Year 12s were doing I have today just finished some summary notes and exercises (to be fair there are more questions than notes) on Circle Geometry.

They start from the basics as shown below:

and then progress to the more difficult problem solving questions, such as determining the equation of a circle that passes through 3 points.

Feel free to use them and download from below:

Questions

Questions with solutions

NB: This is my second post for #MathsWeekEngland. Check out their website here.

Today I came across (unless I just haven’t noticed it before) the first thing I haven’t liked in the new style mark schemes for the AQA AS and A-Level Maths exams..

It’s this:

I always make a really big thing about how you mustn’t say “accept” when talking about the null hypothesis as doing a hypothesis test doesn’t give any results information about the validity of life the null hypothesis.

Do you think I am being too pedantic here? I’d love to hear your thoughts?