MAP projects

I've seen all of the student to kick-off their MAP projects. Generally, they seem quite keen but perhaps not as keen as I was anticipating given the opportunity and the effort to get on the program. But then again I'm not sure how enthused a teenager is going to get about maths anyway! I also not sure exactly what level of difficulty to pitch the work at. Hopefully I haven't asked too much of them.

The projects are:

• a comparison between optimal flow algorithms applied to different scenarios, probably health, defence, production, routing
• a comparison between Classical and Bayesian confidence intervals
• internet security using the public key encryption, probably including RSA and prime numbers
• investigation in to the concept and developing definitions of infinity
• Game theory in business

Voting Workshop

With the up coming vote on the the First Past the Post vs AV I thought that this might be a good idea to resurrect my idea about a workshop around different voting schemes. I know that there was a section in the Gelman book bag of tricks about teaching statistics about this and there's bound to be loads of stuff on the internet. Apparently, there are some Who Wants To Be A Millionaire-type voting pads available to use too.

Probability session

This was the second time I've given this session. I think that it was an improvement. I went through the material a lot slower.
I thought that the handout exercise, although it was an improvement, could have been more interesting. At the least I think that the handout needs to be more fun looking. Maybe something to do with getting the pupils to interact with each other? They could maybe take a strawpoll of the rest of the class to estimate a probability on the line? Or they could come up with their own events that fit in to each of the boxes? or I could get them to stand in a line with an event and decide in what order they should stand in increasing probability? maybe 2 lines and make it a competition? This would need to have a definite order though. Could have markers, e.g. chairs, for 0,1,0.5 and get them to stand where they think the event should go?

Should have an extra slide at the end of the workshop of different job that use maths too.

Paper helicopters

I realise that i never redid the paper airplane stats thing i've done before. i'll see if any bodies up for it

Eureka

I saw the Times magazine Eureka and they had a feature called how magic works which made me think of doing something about the statistics of magic

http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/flash/eureka/

New year to do list

•   I plan on doing something for the EPQ on-line resources. The ideas are basic methods in presenting data and results (your own) and how to understand and critique results (someone elses). This second area ties in with the GetStats campaign currently run by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) http://getstats.org.uk/index.html. I’ll try and get something down for the end of January. 
• Delivering the EPQ session. 
• Delivering the probability workshop to primary school kids early February. 
• Catch-up meeting bring workshop ideas for the Science and Engineering week (SEW), 50 mins.
• Help coordinating SEW.
• MAP conference involvement. 
• MAP tutoring.

Year 7 Challenge Demo Feedback

Following the demo of the Game Theory Challenge yesterday, I got some very useful feedback
The games were a little bit to complicated to explain quickly. A little more time will be needed to make the rules absolutely clear
The game took longer than I had thought and there wasn't enough time to wrap up properly. Should just stick to a couple of games
The main thing I think was the use of the sweets. I gave each player a pile of sweets to bet with. This meant that the players already had GAINED something so there was little incentive to play the games! If the prize was less than their pile they just folded early on. This was the case since the games are meant to show that they end up betting more than the pot.
A solution to this is to have the players play against the `banker' i.e. Ambassador so the banker holds all the sweets and then offers them at each turn.

I can't think of a way to auction without the players having their own stash so I've included the traveller's dilemma in its place.

I've also tried to make the Ambassador sheet a lot clearer. It basically a verbatim script now. I've bulleted most of the script and highlighted in a different colour exactly what is script and what is not.