Bringing the real world to life in maths lessons

On Friday 9th April, we supported an event for trainee secondary school maths teachers, organised by the North Yorkshire STEM Hub and the Mathematics Teacher Training Scholarship scheme.

The virtual event aimed to explore how maths is used in a wide variety of careers. It provided an opportunity for trainee teachers to talk to STEM Ambassadors who use maths in their everyday work.

Along with volunteers from a wide range of organisations, Judith Stunell from JBA Consulting and Matthew Powell from JBA Bentley talked to the trainee teachers about their jobs, the organisations they work for and how they use maths in their work.

They provided real life examples of maths for teachers to use in their lessons, to show pupils how maths is used in the workplace and to help inspire pupils to pursue careers that they may never have considered before.

Matthew commented “As someone who did not enjoy maths until I found that it could be applied to real life scenarios, it was great to show the teachers how we use maths in our every day work”.

“I talked to the teachers about how I use maths in environmental flow assessments to calculate whether water can be abstracted from a river without damaging the environment. The teachers were interested to hear about my career journey and to learn about some of the calculations that I use, for example using percentiles to determine low flows” added Judith.

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