Maths in Action Trip: Student Review

On Wednesday 16th of March, Year 10 students attended the Maths in Action Trip in London, where we learned about Maths outside of the classroom and how it can be applied to different careers and jobs after we finish our education. The talks were very interesting and interactive, we were asked questions relating to the talk and were able to use our phones to participate in a live quiz with the rest of the audience, students were also invited to the stage for demonstrations and examples. 

The first talk was called “Bits and Pieces: Secret of the Digital World”. James Grime talked about how devices communicate with each other and the methods discovered during the Second World War and what the Germans used to communicate with each other. We learned how this idea is used now and how this relates to our everyday life with the different technologies we use. We also learned about how binary is used in reading CDs and how if you drill a small hole in the CD the music on the CD will still be able to play. Overall, this talk was very exciting and a great start to our day. 

Next was “Engineering in the Future” by Aimi Elias. Aimi talked about how computers are able to distinguish between certain characteristics and identify what the entire picture is showing. For example, facial ID uses distinctive features of our faces to establish if we are allowed to have access to the phone or not.

Emily Grossman held an interactive talk about how newspapers may manipulate experiments to get the results they need, for example “chocolate can help you lose weight”. This was an actual study but they didn’t do the experiment correctly in order to prove that chocolate actually helps you lose weight (when it doesn’t).

After was “Examination Success” by Nicole Cozens, who talked to us about simple mistakes that students make every year and how to make our work and revision easier to do. We were able to take away the simple tips and tricks she gave us and we learned where most students lose marks on minor mistakes. 

"Colouring in for Mathematicians” by Sophie Maclean really engaged us by mentioning how her friend from university said he only uses two colours in his Maths book. The talk was about different geometry theorems and how she uses colours to show the different ways of proving them. Sophie also challenged two people from the audience to block her from drawing a triangle in one colour by taking it turn by turn to draw a line, proving the challenge to be impossible.  

The final talk was called “Maths vs. Sport” by Tom Crawford - a Mathematician discussing Maths within Sport. He taught us how to score the perfect penalty kick with the highest success rate using things we had learned in class, such as Pythagoras theorem, to find the perfect area of which we could shoot the ball and used people from the audience to prove his point. 

Overall we had a fun day learning about different areas of Maths and how they can be used after our GCSE studies. 

Article written by Urvershi Vekaria