With Maths Week Scotland 2024 behind us, we can now look back at the fantastic data-themed activities that we delivered in partnership with Maths Week.
Maths Week Scotland is a week of events and activities dedicated to the maths that is all around us. The 2024 edition took place Monday 23 September – Sunday 29 September around the theme “Maths Tales”, but other special events are scheduled throughout the year.
While most of the events are now behind us, upper primary/lower secondary students can still take part in our fantastic Escape Room Live Lesson – Find the Secret Lair (7th November 11am-12pm, online): book your space now.
We are thrilled to announce the outstanding success of this year’s Maths Week, with hundreds of schools and thousands of learners joining us to learn more about data! A total of around 13500 learners attended across all the events at Maths Week.
We invited authors from Canada and England to host sessions for primary and secondary students. Learners from Edinburgh and outside the city region joined us in-person and online to meet them and discuss original ways to talk about, and use, data!
David Smith, author of “If the World Were a Village”, joined us from Canada to run two interactive in-person sessions at the National Museum of Scotland on the 24th September and one hybrid session at a school in the Scottish Borders on the 27th September. A total of around 2400 P5-P7 students from across Scotland attended to learn about world population in a fun, compelling way “as if the world were a village”. The sessions included demonstrations and games to introduce complex notions, such as population growth and density.
James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography at UCL and author of “Atlas of the Invisible”, ran an in-person lesson at Tynecastle High School on the 25th September.
Three schools from Edinburgh joined us for a total of 119 registered S5-S6 attendants. James’ talk focused on the use of data visualisation, in particular of maps, as a way to reorganise data to tell engaging and impactful stories. He showed examples of famous maps in history and how they changed perceptions of our world and the society we live in.
The session had tangible impact on the learners’ study and career prospects, with a Q&A session that suggested that the students have significant interest in developing their own maps and data visualisation sets.