North Coast Integrated College pupils and teachers recently teamed up with schools from all over Ireland to take part in some activities linked to Maths Week Ireland. The event takes place each year and is a celebration of all things Maths, involving schools, universities, colleges, museums and businesses.
In order to allow everyone in KS3 to have a chance to get involved and use their skills in maths, the Maths department organised a ’24 Game’ for year 10, a creative ‘Alien Mask’ activity for year 9 and a quiz for year 8. In year 10 pupils have to use their mental maths and problem solving skills to answer quick fire questions in a competitive environment. The overall standard was incredibly high, this comes as no surprise considering North Coast Integrated College have been successful in past years at the area-wide competition held by NEELB.
Not only did pupils celebrate this most fascinating subject, the teachers at NCIC were also keen to play a role and with the assistance of the maths team they all became numbers for a week. The year 8 pupils had to answer challenging questions based on different areas of maths, then find the correct teacher in the school who represented that number. This led to some very competitive goings-on, in some instances the teachers were even getting more excited than the students especially in the ICT department Mrs Shaw and Mrs Kelly!
All in all, the event helped to raise awareness and participation in maths, something which is incredibly important considering nearly all the careers that our students will go on to take up will incorporate maths in some form.
