A maths enrichment afternoon was experienced by a group of enthusiastic Year 10 students from The Royal Harbour Academy last Tuesday. The group travelled by train to the Phoenix Theatre in London, where they were joined by up to 1500 teenagers from across the region to take part in an Inspirational Maths lecture.
Students heard how data is used to make predictions about weather to help with storm protection, quadratic equations can be used to model crowd flow at football stadia and in computer games, and vectors are used in the design of sports stadia and other structures around the world. They also heard how the efficiency of nature, for example in swarms, could be mirrored in structures to achieve design for lower carbon use.
The highlight of the show for many of the students was a demonstration of pattern spotting in juggling and how predictions can be made from patterns. Pascal's triangle and the Fibonacci Sequence were two of the patterns found as part of the juggling tricks being demonstrated with up to 5 balls!
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