A Stem Ambassador visited P7S on Thursday. The STEM philosophy of education is that it embraces teaching skills and subjects in an a way that resembles real life. To this end we asked Mr Innes to discuss Negative numbers in an everyday context,this links closely to our current maths learning. Matthew certainly brought negative numbers alive with a lesson about the negative and positive values of different classroom commodities! The class had to decide if it was worth getting a loan from the banker to expand their portfolio whilst appreciating the risk of changing market forces. We used coloured items of identical shapes (blue counters and red counters, with blue counters representing negative units and red counters representing positive ones), to analyse the importance of negative numbers when, for instance, calculating debts. At the end of the lesson the class had a real appreciation of how maths can impact on their everyday life.
