Mathematical creativity lecture

Well, I am off to the North-West of England tomorrow to give a lecture at Edge Hill University. It takes most of a day to get there from Norwich by train, going via London and Liverpool. I've been asked to talk on 'Creativity in mathematics' to a group of primary school teachers on the Edge Hill Mathematics Specialist Teacher Programme.

This topic is one of my personal enthusiasms and one that I always enjoy sharing with primary school teachers. My involvement in classroom-based research in this area goes all the way back to my 1984 PhD, which I did part-time at London University. Over the years I have been privileged to explore the topic further with various groups of more able children in primary schools, particularly at Cringleford Primary, a local school on the edge of Norwich close to the University. So, I have plenty of material from interacting with children to share on this subject – and I hope this will entertain and stimulate the troops in Ormskirk.

The following weekend I shall be doing a repeat performance in Birmingham, with another cohort of mathematics specialist teachers.

I see that Ian Sugarman is doing a session after me at Edge Hill on place value and calculation. He's always good value – likewise, Ian Thomson, who is doing the same session at the Birmingham event.

Lecture UEA PGCE students: Mathematical Creativity

On Wednesday this week I made a guest appearance at UEA, giving a lecture to the primary PGCE students. My title was: Recognising and encouraging mathematical creativity.

The lecture was filmed and we'll be hoping to make it available online some time this year. In the meantime, one of the students in the audience, Tim Handley, has written a very comprehensive and kind review. You can read this at http://classroomtales.com.

Here's a little snippet. How many lines do you need to draw to divide a rectangle into 4 equal pieces? Obviously, just two lines, as shown in the diagram:

So, how did I manage to get nearly every student in the audience to give the answer 'three lines' to this question?