The Maths team has been busy teaching a wide variety of Maths courses as every student is after their Numeracy tick and working on their maths at a level appropriate to them.

One of the courses is Maths Specialised, taught by Tino Delbourgo. This course is aimed at students who have already achieved highly in their previous pre-tertiary algebra intensive maths course and is especially relevant for preparing students who are interested in science or engineering at university; although it is also a popular subject for students intending to study Medicine, Dentistry or Veterinary Science as it helps them gain a high score to enter these competitive university programmes.

Don students have been learning about a variety of different topics within the course. One of these is called Sequences and Series and it’s all about ways of doing repeated calculations to get approximate answers to solve complicated problems. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you press one of those “magic” buttons on your calculator that work out things like the square root, sin, cos, tan or log, then these students now know how. For example, how does the calculator know that the square root of 2 is approximately 1.41421? How would you work this out if you didn’t have a calculator with a square root button? That’s one of many topics we have been covering this year.

Students who study Maths Specialised need to be very confident of algebra.

Here is an example of a piece of student work solving a problem using proof technique called “mathematical induction”. You can see that we need to be able to break the problem into many small steps and these students know how to do this proficiently. There’s lots of study ahead and we wish all Maths students well in their upcoming assessments and, for those who are studying pre-tertiary subjects, their November external exam.