Teach The Teacher Tuesdays

Have you heard of the CSIRO mathematical learning opportunities? These resources are free and are designed to develop students teamwork skills, critical and creative thinking, problem solving and computational thinking skills.an additional bonus is that there are programs and resources for students from Grade 3 upto Year 12.

A quick overview on the resources CSIRO have are: 

Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge: 

This competition is open twice a year ( 24/4-14/5 and 21/8-10/9) and is open to students from grades 3-12. Each competition takes between 45-60min depending on the age of the student, with a total of 15 questions to complete. To support students in being well prepared for the competition, there are also past completion questions students can practice. Alternatively you could look at the past competition questions to add into your mathematics program to add more problem solving to support students in applying their computational knowledge. What’s most useful, as once the competition is completed and results returned teachers have data on areas in which their class needs improvement in. Teachers can then use the Bebras 365 to support students in these identified areas. To find out more visit CSIRO Bebras. 

Bebras 365: 

Bebras 365 is an additional Bebras resource that can be used to support students in the preparation for the Bebras competition, or just used as an enrichment to learning in mathematics. As suggested, if can be accessed all year round so can be incorporated into learning at any opportunity. It provides great rich mathematical resources that teachers can use at any time. Furthermore CSIRO have also developed a Reflection Worksheet, which can be used to better understand the thinking behind students problem solving, and our particular favourite it’s that it asks students to identify what mathematical skills they think they used in solving the problems? To explore more about Bebras 365 visit link.

CyberTaipan:

This competition is open for high school students. It asks students to use their mathematical reasoning and deductions to identify and work with cyber security issues. There is a virtual Professional Development opportunity today (9/5), if you are interested in this program and wondering if it right for your students. Register through this link. To find out more on the program itself visit link

**CSIRO Logo taken from website