Mathematics is meant to be problematic for students at Bishop Luffa but that doesn’t mean deliberately confusing the students. Rather, problematic means that the students see the task as an interesting problem that is worth trying to solve. Nothing illustrates this quite as well as this week’s year 10 problem. How do you share out 8 different sized sponge cakes, so that everyone has exactly the same amount of cake?
Mr Robinson’s group really took this problem seriously as can be seen by the 8 cakes they actually made to help them with their thinking. Their solutions involved finding the radius and height of each cake and the angle of the sector.
In the previous lessons the same students had come with their own formula for finding the area of a sector (θ/360)*πr2
Comments about the lesson included “scrumptious”, “best lesson ever”, “could we do this every week” and simply “WOW!”
The lesson also marked the end of a visit from Dr Jackson who was encouraged to try all of the cakes before being allowed to leave.
Mr D Robinson, Head of Mathematics