Educational Designer

The aim to improve engagement was central to Bowland Maths, which set out:

“to develop a series of ‘Case Studies’ based around rich contexts which would make mathematical problems more interesting and/or relevant for pupils, with an emphasis on open-ended problems that required a range of process and problem solving skills to solve. The term case study was inspired by its use in institutions such as Harvard Business School, where it refers to a problem, usually taken from real life, that takes several days for students to address.”

Part of the design brief was that the mathematics aspect should not be immediately obvious, but should emerge over the course of the four lessons. Many of the resulting lessons had a drama/role-play element, some setting up plausible scenarios for the authentic application of mathematics and others concocting fantasy themes to ‘gamify’ more abstract mathematics. Both approaches may be necessary to cover the typical mathematics curriculum.

Two specific case studies with contrasting approaches are:

Alien Invasion (developed for Bowland Maths by Twofour learning) is – as the name suggests – the story of a group of students who’s school trip is interrupted by the arrival of UFOs… Saving the day involves solving a variety of mathematical problems, The story progresses through the four lessons as the students try to plot a route to a safe meeting (co-ordinates, bearings, map scales) gather information about the aliens (graph interpretation) and rescue their teacher (breaking a code involving sequences). The context of the mathematics is, of course, highly contrived but sticks to the alien ‘theme’ while each activity is introduced by a video or audio clip of a news bulletin or phone call that maintains the ‘dramatic tension’.