I think I speak on behalf of most students when I express my fear when I was presented with my university timetable and it showed a three-hour maths lecture……

However, this mindset was quickly changed when I found out what the lecture entailed. We were required to take part in a business stimulation game, which would involve us working in partners to act as demand planners. This would relate to the theme of the lecture by looking at supply chains of businesses and carrying out demand planning with regards to our own business.

We were provided with a stock list presenting different prices and what we could get profit wise if we were to sell this stock in different quarters of the year. Each group started with the same budget and we had to pick no more than five items from the stock list for each quarter, We were then provided with figures by the lecturer of how our business performed in terms of how much stock we had sold. This then allowed us to make informed decisions about what stock we would like to order for the following quarter of the year and so forth until the business year came to an end. We could calculate the profit of each stock item after each year quarter to add to our original budget and by the end of the year the aim was to be the group with the most money in the budget, therefore have made the most profit.

If you had asked me at the start of this module, what maths is involved in this game? I would have simply answered addition, multiplication and subtraction.

However, having completed this game it has become very clear of the principals of maths involved go so much deeper. My partner and I were having to use data and analysis to predict what stock we would have to pre-order for the following months, we were having to use patterns and trends by looking at previous months’ performances and predicting the upcoming months that may have special occasions which could affect our stock sales for example valentine’s day had a major impact on the sale of champagne. We were having to think of shelf life of products so thinking about dates and time scales that the products would stay fresh for and judge if they were going to be cost efficient or not.

This lecture was eye-opening to myself and my partner, as I think it was to the whole module group, it highlighted the way maths concepts can interlink (Ma,1999) with one another and how basic maths concepts (Ma,1999) can be used in something so far removed from the four walls of the classroom. I think it was a simple enough idea to carry out with a future upper stage class which would highlight the resourcefulness of maths in the context of wider society. I believe that it would show the relevance of how we can take these concepts that we are learning within a school and how they can be adapted for future use which will promote engagement and benefit their development of mathematic principals as opposed to ‘working from a textbook’.

Lipping, M (1999). Knowing and teaching elementary mathematics: teachers’ understanding of fundamental mathematics in China and the United States. New York and London: Routledge.