Classroom projects

School closed? There are plenty of activities here that you can do at home, but you may have to read the teachers' guide to for each project to understand what you are meant to do.

At the core of Bowland Maths is a set of 26 classroom projects, entitled Case Studies, each of which supports 2 to 5 lessons on a topic from outside mathematics. They develop thinking, reasoning and problem solving skills and put substance into the Key Concepts and Processes or problem solving and mathematical reasoning. Typically, the projects ask pupils to play the role of a team member or advisor tackling a challenge set in a real-life or fantasy scenario.

The Case Studies are very different from each other and have been developed by a wide range of developers. Each one is rich in mathematical possibilities and provides pupils and their teachers with interesting and exciting problems on topics that pupils find fun and engaging. The topics range from the real world to pure fantasy.

The problems make extensive use of 'open' questions, to which there is often no one right answer; most require a number of steps and each can be explored at various levels of depth by pupils of differing abilities. Each Case Study contains materials for pupils to use in the classroom as well as teachers' notes and lesson plans. Most of the Case Studies, but not all of them, require access to some form of ICT.

Note - Sept 2021: many of these units (which were written in 2008-2010) were written for Flash Player - which is no longer supported in the major web browsers. We are in the process of rescuing what we can and, meanwhile, have moved the still-affected case studes to the end of this list and clearly flagged them as "Need Flash". Also, please bear in mind that, where apps have been rescued, we don't currently have the resources to test them as thoroughly as we would like, so please excuse any glitches and try them out before committing to use them in a classroom. More notes can be found below.

Background to the Case Studies Choosing a classroom project