In 2024 Scottish Climate Action Week and Maths Week Scotland coincided. Educators from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh were developing an activity in support of the former that formed the fourth in a series of online lessons hosted by Keep Scotland Beautiful. They felt that their lesson, climate ready gardens, had the potential to be an explicitly¹ maths-relevant resource as well as the climate-action resource it was originally designed to be.
Funding kindly provided by Maths Week Scotland paid for some consultancy time with me: we had an initial meeting in which they outlined the session that they were designing and I advised on things like where activities and other content intersected with aspects of the Scottish maths curriculum, and suggested vocabulary and phrases that might make these links stand out for students and teachers of mathematics. When they had developed the session they sent me its supporting resources which I returned with feedback aimed towards making the mathematical links more obvious and more easily associated with what participating students might recognise from their experiences in lessons at school. I also gave suggestions, where appropriate, for adapting the resources for students working at different stages or with different levels of confidence or experience.
Their completed session was delivered to more than a thousand students from around fifty schools across Scotland during Climate Action Week and was well-recieved. Recording of all of the event’s lessons, along with downloads of associated resources, can be found on Keep Soctland Beautiful’s Climate Action Week 2034 page (The Royal Botanic Garden’s contribution is Lesson 4: Climate ready gardens).
While I love creating activities that are inspired by a mathematical idea from scratch, it is this sort of resource – ostensibly “not-maths”, but tweaked to allow the mathematical links that inevitably exist within it to come to the surface – that arguably has the greatest impact in terms of improving attitudes to (and relationships with) mathematics in participating students.
Footnotes
- I’m yet to meet a resource that isn’t at least implicitly maths-relevant, and it’s usually not a massive job to make it explicit. [back]