Elspeth Hall from the D&G STEM team visited school today to provide the pupils with a fun, hands-on maths workshops – and they certainly weren’t disappointed! The infant class has their session this morning and the upper class went this afternoon. The workshop was part of our Maths Week Scotland celebrations (although we are a week early due to Elspeth’s busy schedule!).

After a little ice breaker where we had a competition to create as many different sized triangles as we could, both classes got their thinking caps on and had to work together to solve problems and complete challenges using various visual and concrete materials. We had:

• The Engine challenge where we had to sequence the coloured carts of the train in the correct order (this involved lots of maths language);
• The Wizard’s Cat where we had to put 3 magic circles around the cats so they each had their own space;
• Dice Towers where each of the 4 sides had to equal 14 but no number could be the same (think Sudoku using dice!);
• Domino walls where each side had to equal 10;
• And the Milk Bottle challenge where we had to fit 6 milk bottles into a 5×3 crate, ensuring that each column and row had an even number of milk bottles.

We finished off with a bit of healthy competition where pupils could only move the hands of the clock on by either 30-minute or 1-hour. The winner was the first person to get to 12pm.

The pupils had a brilliant time applying their maths skills into problems. Many thanks to Mrs Hall for providing pupils with a fantastic maths roadshow!