Term 2 Week 1

A promising start to the development of Nuclear Fusion - people who develop their maths abilities do have the option to become mad scientists...

Welcome back to maths in second term!

The Bushelle group is doing more work with Exploring Number.

The Hammer group is doing more advanced Algebra - Products and Factors.

For example - what if you had to multiply two expressions together?

(a + 1) x (b + 2)

Because we are scrupulously fair we must multiply everything in the first expression by everything in the second one so we end up with:

= a x b + a x 2 + 1 x b + 1 x 2
= ab + 2a + b + 2

As always we can test this by putting in some actual numbers - say a = 5 and b = 7

so (a + 1)(b +2) = (5 + 1)(7 + 2) = (6)(9) = 54
and ab + 2a + b + 2 = 5 x 7 + 2 x 5 + 7 + 2 = 35 + 10 + 7 + 2 = 54

Which gives us some confidence that our multiplication of algebra expressions works!

The Products and Factors Assignment 1 is here

Week 10

fractal broccoli

Congratulations to all those who did well in the recent Algebra topic test!

We are ready now to move on to new topics. John's group is doing more work with number calculations. The Hammer group is spending a little time with some more advanced Algebra - doing binomial expansions, and then hopefully factorising polynomials.

How to do a binomial expansion? It is just multiplying one 'expression' with another 'expression':

(a + 2) x (b + 3)

The trick is to multiply everything in the first expression by everything in the second (don't leave any bit out)

= a x b + a x 3 + 2 x b + 2 x 3
= ab + 3a + 2b + 6

Don't get too stressed about this - we will do lots of practice, and as a bonus there will be no assignment over the holidays, so relax your brain and enjoy!