Frogs and Candles - Tales from a Mathematics Workshop

Summary

A Mathematics Workshop is an event organised for a group of voluntary participants - usually children - to meet and engage collectively in a variety of mathematical activities. In this paper we describe the development of mathematics workshops, mainly in the United Kingdom, by members of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM).

Workshops can take a variety of forms, perhaps the simplest of which is one mounted on a Saturday morning, when typically the organisers are members of a local branch of the ATM. Each of the contributing teachers will arrive with a couple of their favourite activities which they will run all morning with different groups of children.

Sometimes families arrive as groups, so that a wide range of ages of children work together with parents joining in as well. For example, at a recent workshop a set of mathematical games, available at several levels of difficulty, was set out on a table. It was observed that the older children were initially happy to play a simple game which everyone could cope with and then to help the smaller ones to play a harder version. At no point did they appear even to wish to take advantage of the fact that they were more competent at what was involved.