9th November 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Plans from the Department for Education revealed this week suggest that a charity will be set up to find ways to make the school curriculum more interesting for students. Some of the ideas that have been suggested include focussing on ‘real world’ problems, including working out the chances of their holiday flight crashing, or how far they can trust political opinion polls.
The initiative is based on the ideas of Tim Gowers, a professor of Maths at Cambridge University, who spoke out about the ‘dullness’ of the current A’ level syllabus. Writing on his blog, Gowers suggested questions that would have students pondering the cost/benefit of paving over their gardens to create parking spaces, and calculating the number of molecules in a single breath.
The charity will be asked to think about how real world problems could encourage more students to take up maths and sciences, by making them more accessible to students. The new curriculum will also give students the opportunity to showcase their talents as the questions will require them to use lateral thinking to solve multiple steps.