We started by looking at this problem.
Next we took a look at Benford's Law.
- Populations
- Number of goals scored in a season
- Average playing time per player
- House numbers on a street
- Cost of items in a weekly shop
Exploding Dots was a part of the Global Maths Project a couple of years back, set up by James Tanton. It is definitely worth checking out the website.
We study this in the course, but a couple of students asked to look at it in more detail. I was fairly lazy with this one, relying on some excellent resources available online.
I taught D1 once before leaving the UK, but it has been a while since I have done any decision maths. I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to take a look at the Chinese postman problem. I based the lesson on the plan from the Standards Unit, and turned it into a Desmos Activity. It was a very discursive session, so I paced them through the activity to start with, and also talked about the ideas whilst demonstrating and collating their ideas on a whiteboard.
Based on a couple of articles from nrich, I put together an activity on continued fractions. We started with evaluating them (like the one below).