Penalty Angles

Going back a couple of months, we came across 'The science behind Eden Hazard's FA Cup winning penalty' on Facebook. We watched it and, of course, it gave us an idea for a lesson...

It was the video's thumbnail (above) that caused our minds to begin thinking 'school' and 'maths'.

Like you, we imagine, one of our biggest tasks is the 'how do we get them engaged?' question. Football is usually quite successful!

Here's a photo of Messi taking a penalty. Similar to us, you could search the internet, or screen capture penalties being taken (remember to check copyright laws!). 

If you attend football matches, you could take your own photos:

Perhaps, even better. Get the children taking and photographing their own penalties. 

28/10/18 Update: See here for numerous examples!

Finally, whichever you choose, give the children example shots of the penalties being taken. Get them to put on the '0 degree line' and measure the angle from there. If using your own photos, is there an angle that guarantees scoring?

Got some examples? Do share them...

Some Quite Interesting Numbers

Watching last week's QI on the BBC, they had a feature that I thought would be useful in school to ignite some interest in maths. 

What's interesting about these numbers?

The picture is the Mayan zero.

The '2 to the power of...' is the largest known prime number (at the time of writing).

If someone wrote out the numbers 1 - 10 billion in words and organised them in alphabetical order, 8,000,000,085 would be the first odd number.

142,857 is a cyclical number: multiply it by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 and the product (each time) is an anagram of it!

Frobenius number - Chicken nuggets are sold in 6s, 9s and 20s. 43 is the largest number of nuggets that can't be bought.   

There you go. Share them as they are, or even make an investigation out of some of them. Quite interesting.