Where do I use Maths?

In our CoL meeting at the start of this term, we were asked this question ...

For our next PLG - One key strategy in reading and maths that you know works in your practice
- be specific, what do you do? (Russell is asking other Outreach clusters to do the same.)

We will all commit to trying these out at a Manaiakalani and Outreach level

It has been 5 weeks since then and I was blank about it till this week when I was working with my intermediate classes. They have been designing games and we needed to work out what their requirements were for the board for the game. These sizes will then be put into the laser cutter for their board to be produced.

After thinking about this CoL question, I was quite surprised at the maths that crops up in graphics.

In this example with Year 8, we were working out the size of the centre piece based on the size of the individual board squares. We then had to work out the overall size for the  base square.

With my Year 13 class, we have been doing measuring of large space when we measured the auditorium. Blog post here. We then used this information to make sure the work we were doing was to scale.  We cut pieces of MDF to the correct proportion fro the top of the stage so they could work out how big their design elements were in relation to the position and people.

So I think to answer the original question, I don't actively "do maths" in my lesson but it seems to crop up in the natural course of a design project. When it does, I am sure to point out that "this is where they use their maths skills " .. "maths is not just for maths lessons".