Mathematics is the most popular A-level in the UK. But it’s not turning out the right kind of mathematician.
“There is a frustration in maths faculties that students are arriving with top marks and yet they can’t bring together different ideas. They are so very fluent but cannot problem-solve off-piste,” says Lynne McClure of Cambridge University.
In an attempt to turn students into more versatile problem-solvers, the university has come up with a tube map that shows how different areas of the syllabus connect with each other.
The map has five lines: Number, Geometry, Algebra, Functions and Calculus. (They missed a trick not calling geometry the Circle line.)
To me it’s surprising to discover that nothing like this has been done before, since one of the most powerful and beautiful aspects of mathematics is how so many fields within it interconnect. Indeed, the ‘depth’ of an idea is often a measure of how many different fields it unites. And a London tube-style map is a very elegant way of showing how things link to each other.
McClure is a co-director of the project, Underground Mathematics, which was funded by the Department for Education and has taken five years to develop. She says that there are many ways they could have drawn the map, but this one “makes the connections we wanted to make.”
She added that maths is still taught (and tested) “in dollops” rather than as a connected whole, which means that students can be very blinkered in how they approach problems.
“We want to encourage the idea that even though there is always a correct answer, there can be multiple ways of solving. The hope is to make kids better problem solvers.”
While the tube map is set to be a fixture of A-level classroom walls, its website undergroundmathematics.org has lots of resources for teachers and students organised by line and station.
Now mind the (prime) gaps!
I’m the author of the recently published Can You Solve My Problems? A Casebook of Ingenious, Perplexing and Totally Satisfying Puzzles which also encourages off-piste problem solving!
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