Talk About Maths In My Job To School Children

[newbie99]

Hi I have asked by primary school to spend 30 min talking about maths in my job.

How do I approach it? The maths involved in my job is Engineering maths and it will be too difficult for an 8 years old to understand. So how do I approach it?

Any thoughts will be appreciated. It need to be interesting and they understand what I am talking about.

[grasscarp]

You could tell them how the things they are learning now are the building blocks for the future. How the basics e.g. times tables, mental arithmetic etc help in every day life. You can ask them what they enjoy and don't like. Then move on to explain the types of things you do. Even if they don't fully understand it they will very likely be interested. It is only half an hour.

[fiction-factory]

The key points will be to enthusiastic about engineering that they will want to be able to something equally exciting in the future and to give some practical examples of how you need to what they will recognise as maths- measuring to the nearest millimetre or micrometre, weighing, height of a building, calculating percentages. Don't dwell on anything that's too complicated but point out for example that when you build a bridge what could happen if you get things very slightly wrong. Maybe get them to build a bridge from straws and see which structure works best

[fiction-factory]

My keyboard is playing up- lots of short words like be and to didn't seem to appear there.

[Hymie]

Although at 8 years old, they won’t understand the complexity of the maths you use – you could explain how important it is and give an example.

Being a fossil, electronic calculators did not exist during my schooling – so everything had to be worked out longhand. Now I’ve become lazy and use a calculator for some very simple calculations, but very importantly, I know the approximate answer. Many a time, not looking at the calculator display while keying in the sum, the answer is nowhere near that expected. I then know that I must have made a mistake, or not fully depressed a key during the process.

As a real life example, back in the 90s I had a school leaver working with me – groups of 4 numerical values needed to be averaged (a very simple task for a calculator and very easy to mentally check that the calculated result was correct, since all the numerical values were around 65 (given to 3 decimal places)).

Using a calculator, the school leaver had written the calculated answers beneath each group of 4 numbers required to be averaged. All of the calculated results were around 65 (as expected), but one result was around 260 – the school leaver seemed oblivious to the fact that this may not have been correct.

So perhaps you could stress the importance of having the maths skills required to know that the result (given by the calculator/computer) is somewhere close to that expected.

[EDDIE51]

^^ Yes I had a similar situation. I bought 6 items in a shop each was between £1 and £2 , so I knew the total would be £8 to £10. The assistant added them all up on the till, it was one of the old tills where you have to enter each price manually. He rang the total and asked me for £26.
I said ''No that can't be right'' he just looked at the till and said ''that's what it says'' He was going completely on what he had rung incorrectly in. I had worked out the correct price in my head by now. I told him ''I have six items all between £1 and £2 so how can the total be £26? ''
Eventually he cancelled the transaction and did it again correctly, he was astounded when the total was what I had told him.Just no concept of estimation or basic addition.You could use such an instance to show the importance of being sufficiently numerate to know if the answer you get on a computer or calculater is in the right range.

[Peter Pedant]

Yeah OK you have to do the maths-is-fun bit

and you have been invited by either a far seeing head master
or a end-of-the-tether teacher whose class 'won't add'

I am not sure if they need to understand the links so long as they know the maths link

do they have IT in the class ? like powerpoint ?
if they do then I would include some viddie - esp

tacoma bridge blowing down 1940
and if they had done their math .... it would still be standing
you could also point out that it is vibrating at its first torsional frequency as well which no one seems to notice ....

and one of the fail-cam crashes where the person gets up and walks away
equal weights bounce apart, and unequal weights ( cycle+ car) erm dont
( newtons second law )

tornados and weather ... predicting and erm how they cant
No! how with math they CAN ( almost )

Rockets, gravititaion - views of sputniks and the earth .....
and this could never have ben done without Newton

code breaking and bletchley
not without Turing
( and NO ONE understands colossus ! )

and you could do the money change at an apple and oranges store

but its not as fun as James Bond - buppa-buppa-bam ! ( Newtons 2nd law again )