A week in ... Maths

It all adds up to another busy week of online learning for our pupils in all year groups! Continuing our series focusing on our online provision, Head of Mathematics Mr Matthew Doggett tells us what his department has been teaching in the last week.

The week saw the first online Intermediate Maths Challenge, with some pupils from Years 9, 10 and 11 taking part, solving a variety of problems designed to test mathematical reasoning and application of key ideas to solve interesting problems.

In addition, Year 7 have been looking at the key ideas in fractions, researching different areas as groups and then presenting back to the rest of the class. Year 8 have been investigating key algebraic ideas involving simplifying algebraic expressions and substituting values for letters.

Year 9 have covered a number of different topics, including ratio, index laws and inequalities, while Year 10 continue to move through key topics from the IGCSE course, including Trigonometry, Circle Theorems, Graphing and Inequalities.

Year 11 are continuing to work on the final few topics of the course, such as Differentiation, Bounds and Proportionality alongside revision of topics covered previously, working through past paper questions. The Pre-IB classes have been continuing to move through the course, studying Proportionality and transformations of graphs.

Year 12 are making good progress in their respective course. The A Level students are pushing on with the Applied Mathematics topics, while the Further Maths class has moved on to the second half of the A Level course, with topics including sequences and series, and Radian measure. The IB A&A students were revising Functions in Standard Level and the Higher Level worked on the Binomial expansion. The A&I side have been covering completing the square, with the Higher Level looking at Logarithms and exponential functions.

Year 13 have been working on the later topics of their respective courses. The A Level classes have been working on Applied Mathematics, including Forces and Friction, and the Normal Distribution. The Further Maths class are looking at some of the most challenging concepts covered in Mathematics at school, including Leibnitz’s Theorem, L’Hopital’s Rule, Euler’s Method for approximating solutions to first-order differential equations, and elastic collisions in one dimension. Over in the IB, the Standard Level students have been revising ideas covered earlier in the course, while the Higher Level A&A students have been looking at calculus and the A&I students have finished Graph Theory and moved onto further Statistics.