These 15 instant maths ideas, ideal for use as starter questions, extension question or probing questions to assess understanding, require students to perform a practical experiment in order to estimate a value for pi, describe a circle over the phone, find a connection between the length of the radius of a circle...

This resource provided by Siemens, aimed at primary learners, looks at how science, technology and engineering has shaped the way we live. It is divided into four activities which link to aspects of the technology, science and mathematics curriculum.

• The power of steam - The first part...

When you have a set of data the first thing you need to do is to check it out and eliminate any obviously wrong or false data. This is called “Cleaning the Data”.

This resource from CensusAtSchool provides a...

This activity aimed at primary level contains a series of five simple grids to help children reinforce their understanding of co-ordinates. Each sheet contains a simple co-ordinate grid filled with letters and provides sets of coordinates which children then look up to find encoded words. Each grid contains a...

This activity focuses on coin recognition and addition skills. Designed to be used as a bingo game involving calculation, it may also be used as a simple sorting and matching activity.

Each child has a Bingo Board featuring nine stamps, a selection of coins in a bag and a set of counters to mark off the...

This resource focuses on developing coin recognition skills in either a bingo game or a collecting, sorting and matching activity. As a Bingo game, each child should have a board and the group also need a selection of coins in a bag. Children take it in turns to select a coin at random from the bag, covering a...

This resource contains nine instant maths ideas exploring what makes a good questionnaire, tasks requiring students to make their own questionnaire, experiments for students to perform in order to collect data, and tasks looking at the subtleties of sampling and grouping data. Student resource sheets ask students...

This SMILE resource contains one pack of games, investigations, worksheets and practical activities supporting the teaching and learning of data collection.

Collecting data contains five work cards with activities covering how to perform a vehicle survey, how to compare hand and foot size,...

This activity, from the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM) publication ‘It Makes You Think’, consists of a series of clue cards and a series of resource cards. The resource cards consist of different coloured discs. Students are required to arrange the discs in a specific order by following the...

Combinations consists of seven instant maths ideas including a consideration of the number of arrangements of dots used when writing in Braille, an investigation of Pascal’s triangle, investigating the number of routes through New York, exploring the number of ways six letters can incorrectly be placed in six...

This SMILE resource contains two packs of games, investigations, worksheets and practical activities supporting the teaching and learning of combined transformations, from drawing symmetrical patterns to using matrices to perform shears.

In these activities, pupils are introduced to the idea of controlled or uncontrolled re-entry for satellites. They are challenged to devise a way of reducing space debris by designing alterations to satellites so that they bring themselves back to Earth. In the first activity, the students pretend to be satellites...

This worksheet asks children to colour in grids to show what percentage of our genes we share with a number of plants, animals and microbes. The activity can be supported with the animation ...

This resource contains 13 instant maths ideas designed to provide the opportunity for students to explore the notation of time and the decimalisation of time, work with bus and train timetables, discover what speed an aircraft flies when it travels at ‘mach 2.5’, what crafts’ speed is measured in knots, calculate...

Published by the Mathematics Centre at the University of Chichester, this booklet describes ideas that have been used with students aged 9-11 , although there are indications that older students would benefit from them too. In the first part of the booklet much use is...