A Circus Of Great Maths Ideas
The Age
Monday April 18, 1994
Several creative Australian companies are developing educational packages that compete against the world's best, reports BRUCE DIXON.
AFEW WEEKS AGO I wrote of my concern regarding the lack of any significant Australian educational software development. Responses from local developers were interesting.
Several responded along the lines of, ``This is the product I'm developing, which you should support just because it's Australian".
Well, I'm sorry, but after decades of watching that mistake made in many of our other promising industries, I think this country has grown up enough to want to now compete at a world market level.
Despite being handicapped by governments that fail to give incentives to those Australian companies with potential, we must be prepared to set our sights high.
Other responses referred to the beginnings of a new generation of products that are coming through on CD-ROM. And I'm pleased to report I've also received copies of several packages that are excellent examples of what creative Australian companies are now developing for education.
One comes from the recently formed GreyGum Software company in Queensland, which has taken over the publishing rights of the Jacaranda Software products and is in the process of developing several new titles. Jacaranda's former publishing manager, Bruce Mitchell, has teamed up with Jacaranda's program designer; an ex- Victorian teacher, David Smith; and a third partner, Steve Luckett, to develop some top quality educational software. And if the first title under the GreyGum banner, Maths Circus, is an indication of what's to come, we can be confident of some world-class local development for the future.
I like the simplicity of the product. In essence it presents students with 12 maths puzzles and activities that are based around a circus theme. Some of the ideas aren't completely new, such as a beam balancing activity to set unicyclists at the best balancing point on a beam, or the lions activity, which is a twist on the old Towers of Hanoi, but all are presented in an easy-to-use format that allows for a wide range of difficulty levels determined by teacher or student.
Teacher options allow the teacher to monitor progress at any point.
The screen design is simple and consistent across all activities and, most importantly, it allows students to easily retry an activity if they are unsuccessful, or select a similar problem at an easier level.
If successful, they can either choose a more difficult problem or another problem of the same type, using different variables in order to reinforce the basic concept.
An example of this is the activity in which students have to land Captain Blunthead, the human cannonball, in a swimming pool. At the easiest level they simply adjust the angle of elevation of the cannon until he lands in the water. Once they have succeeded at this, the easiest level, they can repeat the task, which then places the water in a different position, or move to a more complex level which introduces other variables such as deciding how much gunpowder to use, which in turn affects the trajectory of the shot.
Other activities look at simple arithmetic puzzles to unlock the combination on a circus cage lock, money sums built around ticket sales, a captivating pendulum activity using trapeze artists, a problem-solving measurement activity and a sliding block puzzle that becomes almost as difficult as a Rubik's Cube.
This is a package that could be seriously used at any primary level, and would even be popular in some Year7 classes.
While there are too many activities to describe individually, I particularly liked the clowns and the traffic light puzzles. As with most of the activities, the objective for the clowns is simple. You have to make eight clowns stand up at once. The only problem is that some of these clowns behave a little oddly. If a hose clown stands up, he squirts all clowns to his left or right and they sit down again. A ladder clown swings his ladder around like a Keystone cop and knocks down any clown to his immediate right or left. A stick clown changes the position, either up or down of the clown sitting to her immediate right or left. Confused? Well so you should be, as it isn't an easy one to solve! What is really interesting about this puzzle is the level of complexity that comes from the wonderful explanations students have about how to solve it.
The traffic lights puzzle hits a little closer to home with your columnist, when he had to judge the best time to leave home in a car and travel up a hill so as to get all the green traffic lights along the way. As with most of the activities, this one requires some off- computer planning and strategy, but none of that has helped me get all the green lights along Nepean Highway.
As with all Jacaranda products, Maths Circus comes with a number of useful blackline masters, and a very helpful teacher's guide that not only gives you hints for each of the puzzles, but also suggestions for associated classroom activities and a bibliography.
And, finally, the most attractive part is the GreyGum pricing. A single pack of Maths Circus for DOS, Mac or Acorn Archimedes is $95.
But if you purchase two copies, that constitutes a site licence for all desktop machines on a single campus. Laptop schools can licence Maths Circus to students at the rate of one more copy for each 20 laptops, providing the school already has a site licence. And if you have, say, 20 Archimedes and 40 Macs in your school you only need to buy one Mac and one Arc copy to permit use on all 60 machines. Maths Circus is available from most good educational software outlets and is distributed by GreyGum; phone (07)3660823, fax (07)3660824.
Maths Circus is already being published in the United Kingdom by the popular 4Mation group, and discussions are underway with several American distributors. World-class product designed and developed here in Australia. There should be more of it.
© 1994 The Age
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