A Maths Starter of The Day

Teachers' Notes

Press the "C" key before starting a new calculation
Press F5 or "Refresh" to start again
Click here to open activity in new window (The press F11 to hide tool bars)

 

Starter of The Day Menu | Transum Software



Custom Search

Keywords: Starter | Arithmetic | Calculator | Puzzles

"When entering 4x4-3x3 the calculator does not follow BIDMAS and therfore was confusing for some students."

Helen, Monmouth
Wednesday, September 06, 2006

 

"Teachers please note. This broken calculator does not obey the BODMAS (BIDMAS) convention. Students will soon find this out themselves. It would be a valuable teaching point to highlight that not all calculators do. Some older calculators will carry out each operation as soon as its key is pressed. Try an example if you are not sure how your calculator behaves.

2 + 3 x 4 =
The answer will be 14 for a BODMAS calculator and 20 for an LTR calculator
See also Reverse Polish Notation"

Transum,
Saturday, September 09, 2006

 

"The pupils really enjoyed working out the numbers 1 to 20. It created a good buzz in the classroom. I told them in advance that the calculator was a basic calculator and therefore worked from LTR. It was interesting to see which pupils came up with the most concise answers. It was more than a 10 minute starter."

*Kaye Rumpel, Hope Valley College
Friday, September 15, 2006

 

"Agree with Kaye. Really engrossed the kids and last for almost half an hour. Very enjoyable."

Olivia, New Zealand
Saturday, September 06, 2008

 

How did you use this starter? Can you suggest how teachers could present or develop this resource? Do you have any comments? It is always useful to receive feedback and helps make this free resource even more useful for Maths teachers anywhere in the world. Click here to enter your comments.

If you don't have the time to provide feedback we'd really appreciate it if you could give this page a score! We are constantly improving and adding to these starters so it would be really helpful to know which ones are most useful. Simply click on a button below:
 
Excellent, I would like to see more like this
Good, achieved the results I required
Satisfactory
Didn't really capture the interest of the students
Not for me! I wouldn't use this type of activity.

This starter has scored a mean of 4.3 out of 5 based on 87 votes.
 

  

Previous Day | This starter is for 5 September | Next Day


Visit the Transum Online Shop

Answers

Here's one set of answers, there are many more..
Teacher, do your students have one to one access to computers?

Whether your students each have a TabletPC or share a desktop PC, this activity lends itself to eLearning (Engaged Learning).

Here's the URL which will take
them to a student version of this activity.

http://www.transum.org/go/?to=calc34