What’s new? October 2021

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2021-22: Sep

GeoGebra applets

Visualising the range and interquartile range

This applet has been added at S4e, to help make the range and interquartile range—as well as quartiles themselves—more visual.

Here are some caterpillars, arranged in order of length. The lengths of the caterpillars, in mm, are shown:

Newton’s Law: pulleys

This applet has been added to our KS5 resources. The applet allows you to adjust the masses of the particles, (but note that the mass of \(P\) must be greater than the mass of \(Q\)), and you can also adjust the initial heights of the two particles. Clicking Animate reveals the following:

  • the motion of the particles
  • the tension in the string
  • the time it takes for \(P\) to hit the ground
  • the maximum height reached by particle \(Q\)

Binomial expansion

This applet provides an introduction to the binomial expansion. The applet allows you to change coefficients of the terms in the bracket, and to adjust the index between 1 and 3. It then allows you to click on any term in the expansion, which highlights the branches of the tree that contribute towards the term you have clicked:

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Desmos classroom activities

We have continued to add Desmos classroom activities to our Resources. These Desmos activities contain randomised questions which means that for any given tasks, students in general will get similar, but not identical, questions to each other. As a teacher, you can quickly see the type of questions that students are seeing, but you can also dig deeper to see the specific question that each student sees. The video below shows the mobile phone screen of a student working through a task (on the right) and the teacher’s dashboard view (on the left). Whilst teachers can monitor students’ progress on a question-by-question basis during a live lesson, you don’t have to do this in real time. You can simply check how students fared at a later time, if you wish. This makes these activities suitable for use as homework tasks.

Where available, you will find links to these Desmos classroom activities in the expandable Teacher resources boxes under a topic’s set of slides.

Delta exercises

We have continued to add Delta exercises to a few topics, to follow on from the Alpha, Beta and Gamma exercises.

Shortcut and mashup questions

We have continued to add to our shortcut and mashup resources, which now feature over 50 problems, with the fifth of the five questions in the tweet below being the latest addition. Shortcut problems can be solved with very little working if students have a good understanding of the relevant concepts. It is often possible to solve these without such an understanding, but students will find it far more laborious. Mashup problems interweave different topics within a single question, and generally require a significant amount of written working.