There is an ever-increasing need for a collection of statistical experiments that can be used in the classroom. Ideally they should be linked to (and motivated by) attempts to model or simulate real situations. Mandel attempts to satisfy this need by studying some simple classroom experiments in physics from a statistical viewpoint. Unfortunately most of the experiments deal with artificial situations. Downton discusses the role of statistics in schools and lists a dozen suitable classroom experiments. This paper is strongly recommended and is full of interesting and controversial ideas.

Suppose someone gave you a large collection of identical regular tetrahedra. Would it be possible to glue them together face to face in such a way that you formed a nontrivial ring, or doughnut, in the sense that, during the glueing process, you could glue a tetrahedron both to your last tetrahedron and your first? Tetrahedra would be allowed to cut into each other if necessary.

In the theory of special relativity one encounters the notion of time dilatation. A commonly cited example is that “a clock moving relative to an observer is found to run more slowly than one at rest relative to him” [1]. This concept, although readily acceptable on a purely mathematical basis, often appears somewhat mystical to a student, when compared with his everyday experiences in the physical world. In order to bridge the gap between the mathematics and the physical world, a simple physical analogy (which could easily be constructed as a classroom demonstration) illustrates in a nonrelativistic manner this rather unintuitive notion of relativistic time dilatation.

The algebra of sets admits a quite elementary presentation in the form of an axiomatic system, which may well be suitable for sixth form school teaching. In this note, however, I am concerned not with axiomatics but with the development of set theory in terms of the membership relation; or to be more precise I am concerned with that part of set theory which deals only with the Boolean operations and the relations of equality and inclusion, but does not seek to generate sets.

There is a widely held view that the jump from school to university mathematics is a big one. Recently James and Fiala have dealt respectively with the interdependence of school and university courses and the teaching of mathematics at university level. It seemed pertinent to obtain the views and opinions of students at the start of their mathematical studies at university.