The Internet and Secondary Mathematics

Sites are (too) briefly annotated, with a view to identifying what is distinctive about them. Many of the annotations include descriptions of the sites based on information provided by the sites themselves, acknowledged at the bottom of this page.

Sites here have mostly been selected from a somewhat larger list at my home page.

The main focus of the selections is (mostly) whether or not secondary school students would be likely to benefit from accessing them. Both interactive sites (where students are expected to engage with mathematics in some way) and non-interactive sites (which are mostly for reading for some purpose) are included.

Please send an email to suggest changes, deletions, additions, etc. This list does not claim to be copmprehensive, but is mostly intended to be ilustrative, to help start some conversations about the merits of Internet access by students.

Some sites

Oundle Links
Oundle School web links. Very comprehensive and well-structured

New Scientist Hot Spots
A good collection of mathematically interesting sites with useful annotations.

MathsNet
Brian Dye's MathsNet is full of interesting ways of using the Internet with mathematics. Start with the tour suggested on the opening page to get an idea of the range of things available here.

nRich Online Maths Club
After three years NRich, based at Cambridge University, has thousands of members from 50 countries and many more regular users. School students, teachers and those professionally involved in education are welcome to join. On the first of each month (except August) the site provides new magazines for school students of all ages with an emphasis on mathematical activity. NRICH publishes children's solutions to mathematical challenges. NRICH provides an answering service and many special interest discussion groups.

PASS Maths
Public Awareness and Schools Support for Mathematics is a project of the Millennium Mathematics Project, based at Cambridge University (also related to nRich). Contains a wealth of interesting expository mathematical material, with an archive available of earlier publications. Of interest to both teachers and students.

The Mathematics Forum Student Center
part of the superb US Math Forum site, which is well maintained and with links to a vast range of sites. This part of the Math Forum has material directed at pupils.

Mega-Mathematics
Assorted activities for students

Online journals for high school students
A list of online journals compiled and maintained by SMARD

Ask Dr Math
An award-winning information service for students who have mathematical questions.

Math in Daily Life
Interactive exhibits from the CPB/Annenburg Foundation's archives regarding the uses of mathematics in everyday life, based on the TV series, For All Practical Purposes.

Problems of the Week
Based at the Math Forum, POW each week contains problems to which students can submit solutions for assessment. Categories include Elementary (ie Primary school), Middle School, Geometry. Algebra, Discrete Maths and Trigonometry & Calculus. Mentors needed, too (to assess student efforts). The site also contains links to other similar sites.

MegaPenny Project
This site provides various ways of thinking about large numbers, using US pennies (one cent pieces). Interesting visualisations of millions, billions and beyond!

St Andrews' History of Mathematics
Produced by the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, this is a wonderful and rich archive related to the history of mathematics. The site has deservedly won very many international awards for excellence.

Biographies of women mathematicians
Part of an on-going project by students in mathematics classes at Agnes Scott College, in Atlanta, Georgia, to illustrate the numerous achievements of women in the field of mathematics. Comprehensive and well-organised.

Chance and Data in the News
An excellent website maintained by Jane Watson and colleagues at The University of Tasmania, highlighting the role of chance and data in news media.

Exploring Data
A rich resource created by Rex Boggs of Queensland. This website contains activities, worksheets, overhead transparency masters, data sets and assessment to support data exploration. It also contains an extensive collection of articles designed to enhance the statistics knowledge of the teacher. There is a resources page that gives a select list of the finest resources available to support introductory statistics, including texts, web sites, data sets, java applets and mailing lists.

Symmetry and Tessellations
A large collection of activities of various kinds and many WWW links related to symmetry and tessellations

Millennium Mathematics Project
The Millennium Mathematics Project is an excellent UK initiative based at Cambridge University which aims to make people of all ages and interests more aware of the importance and excitement of mathematics - and its many applications - to their everyday lives. The Project builds on the existing successes of both PASS Maths and its sister online publication, nRICH, in reaching schoolchildren and teachers with interesting articles and puzzles about mathematics.

NOVA
Maintained by the Australian Academy of Science, this site contains some interesting material concerned with how mathematics is used. Well-structured self-contained articles contain activities, a glossary, information and links to other related sites. The goal of NOVA is to provide reliable and up-to-date information for senior secondary school teachers to use in class (although they also hope that anyone with an interest in topical issues will find it useful). The information on Nova has been checked for accuracy by experts in the field and is updated regularly. Of interest to students as well as their teachers.

Internet projects for elementary statistics
Addison Wesley Longman have produced this site, with a wealth of material for an introductory one-semester statistics course, based on data (mainly US in origin) of various kinds. The site is intended to supplement an AWL statistics textbook written by Neil Weiss, but seems to stand alone as well. Each chapter is based around actual real-world situations, with sections on Background, Data Views, Analysis and Reference. Although the course by its nature deals with many inferential ideas, it would still serve as a useful resource to teachers and students of statistics courses that did not involve inferential statistics. An innovative and very impressive use of the web for teaching and learning.

The Cereal Box problem
This is a nice example of using simulation to tackle a problem when you don't have enough theoretical mathematics to do otherwise. This website includes a Java applet for simulating the purchase of successive cereal boxes in order to collect a complete set of cards. A good elementary introduction to Monte Carlo procedures.

NCTM Illuminations
This website is intended to help 'illuminate' the new NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics by focusing on Internet-based teaching and learning, including online, interactive, multimedia mathematical investigations. Links to good practice are provided as well as material of direct use for various age groups. The site also contains a searchable electronic version of the new standards-based document.

Powers of Ten
This was a great film some years ago by Charles and Ray Eames and the website captures the essence of it beautifully. A wonderful demonstration of the significance of powers of ten in representing large and small numbers ... the Internet at its best.

The Fibonacci Home Page
A wonderful collection of things related to the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden ratio from Dr Ron Knott of the University of Surrey

World Population Clock
A dynamic counter showing the world population at various times, including now. Select a time in the past or future and obtain an estimate of the population of the world at that time.

Mathematical quotations
A searchable data base of quotations about mathematics produced by Furman University, South Carolina. Includes a random quotation generator, too!

Benford's Law
A nice article from the New Scientist about this remarkable law about the prevalence of the numeral 1 as the first digit in various kinds of data, and its unexpected applications to the detection of fraud.

Prime Numbers
Just about everything you are likely to want to know about prime numbers

Project Interactivate
The goals of Project Interactivate are the creation, collection, evaluation, and dissemination of java-based courseware for middle school mathematics explorations. "Interactivated" lessons, discussions, and activities enable the teacher to extend hands-on activities and to teach new content areas with professional competence and confidence, incorporating technology in appropriate ways. The project includes many resources designed specifically for students or teachers, including the java-based activities, sample lesson plans, background materials, and hyperlinked textbook tables of contents. This site contains many interesting Java applets in geometry & measurement, algebra and probability & Statistics. A US project, Project Interactivate is funded, in part, by the Office of Dependent Education of the Department of Defense. Well worth a look.

Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA)
This is a new journal, sponsored by the MAA. JOMA will publish innovative, class-tested, web-based learning materials, articles on design and use of online materials, original research articles on student learning via online materials and other technology-rich environments, surveys of existing online materials and high-quality "mathlets" (self-contained, dynamic, single-purpose learning tools).

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives for Interactive Mathematics
The goal of this project is to provide (eventually) a large collection of interactive Java applets for learning mathematics, especially K-8. Ultimately the authors will make all materials available at several sources on the Internet, creating a national library from which teachers may freely draw to enrich their mathematics classrooms. The materials will also be of importance for the mathematical training of both in-service and pre-service elementary teachers. These require Java and a fair bit of memory at the moment. Many are still under development, but watch this space!

Virtual laboratory in probability and statistics
The goal of this project is to provide interactive, web-based resources for students and teachers of probability and statistics.

Maths Online
This Austrian site contains many excellent multimedia learning materials in the form of Java applets.

Coin Flipping
A page devoted to flipping coins and seeing how many heads and tails occur. Check the past results and add to them!

Cut the Knot
A rich collection of diverse resources, many of them interactive in nature.

Java applets
A large collection of Java web sites to support mathematics education, collected by SMARD.

The Integrator
Enter an integration exercise and Mathematica will complete it for you.

Platonic Solids
This entry is from Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics, and contains interactive images of the Platonic solids as well as lots of related information. Following the various links to solids allows other aspects (such as duality) to be explored.

QuickMath
This site is available to perform mathematical computations of various kinds, using Mathematica as the engine. Algebra, equations, inequalities, calculus, matrices, graphing and numbers are all accessible. Very powerful, easy to use, good help accessible and even shows the working for some operations (such as algebraic expansions).

Australian Bureau of Statistics offers a number of useful resources located by clickin on the Education link on the Home page. Student Activities are accessible, offering a variety of interesting and topical interactive experiences.

Census Online
This site created by Anthony Harradine and colleagues allows students to draw a random sample of student data and use it to understand both the sampling process and the students who completed the online survey to generate the data. many interesting issues of relevance to adolescents.