Play Sudoku Online

Sudoku is a popular Japanese mind game and a puzzle that you solve with reasoning and logic. Fill in the grid with digits in such a manner that every row, every column and every 3x3 box accommodates the digits 1-9, without repeating any.

Maths: can SuDoku turn the tables?

June 2, 2008. Source; Times Online by Nicola Woolcock

Analysis Britain remains one of the few advanced nations where it is socially acceptable, fashionable even, to profess an inability to cope with mathematics. This can’t-do attitude to numeracy, cited most recently by Sir Peter Williams, who is leading a government-backed review of maths in primary schools, goes to the heart of our problem with maths.

It means that fewer children are having that “eureka” moment when they realize the pleasure and satisfaction of getting to grips with geometry, algebra or long division.

And it feeds into a vicious circle of not enough talented maths graduates going into teaching to inspire the next generation.

The popularity of puzzles such as Su Doku, introduced to Britain by The Times, shows that there is an appetite for number games and puzzles among all ages and backgrounds. But the perception persists, borne out by research published last month by London Metropolitan University, that mathematicians are old, white, middle-class men lacking social skills.

Given these narrow, negative clichés, it is hardly surprising that relatively few young people want to continue with the subject or that standards are slipping.

Dumbing down maths tests 'threat to economy'

June 2, 2008. Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Mathematics exams have become little more than a "tick box test" and fail to teach pupils the skills needed to gain good jobs, according to a new report.

GCSEs are "considerably" easier than tests sat 50 years ago as questions are simplified to make them more relevant to modern teenagers, it said.

Reform, an independent think tank, said the traditional emphasis on algebra, arithmetic and geometry has been dropped in favour of questions focusing on real-life situations. It added that pupils can now gain a good grade with fewer than half the marks needed in 1990.

Reform also claimed that the lack of rigour has led to fewer students studying maths at sixth-form and university – leaving the British economy vulnerable to competition from China and India.

Schools should build on the interest in maths puzzles such as Sudoku to change the image of the subject from "geek to chic", it said.

An international league table last year showed that the maths abilities of 15-year-olds in England had fallen from the eighth best in the world to the 24th –below the international average – according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Opposition MPs have seized on Reform's findings saying that the failure to master the basics was the result of "political meddling". Reform compared O-levels and GCSEs taken between 1951 and 2006. They said the exams had remained "broadly consistent" in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies but standards have "declined markedly" in the past 20 years. Much of the traditional content was dropped when GCSEs were introduced in 1987 to make maths "more accessible" for students.

"Candidates now have to exhibit a degree of familiarity with a much wider but shallower curriculum including handling data (statistics), vectors, transformations and using and applying mathematics," said the report.

Examination papers since the Nineties contain fewer long questions, in favour of tests that are broken down into simple stages using "artificial contexts". This included one paper in the Eighties that asked pupils to draw a diagram of a boat travelling across the water, plotting its distance and speed.

The introduction of GCSEs also heralded a rise in the use of calculators in examination halls, said researchers, with pupils able to "get away with having a much weaker grasp on the fundamentals of mathematics" to gain a good grade. In 1990, students needed to score 50 per cent in the higher tier paper to get a grade C - but this dropped to 20 per cent in papers taken in 2000 and 2006.

Reform said the shift towards "relevant" maths had turned many bright pupils off the subject, with just 60,093 studying it at A-level in 2007 compared to 84,744 in 1989. Since 1990, a "lost generation" of nearly 440,000 pupils has given up maths after GCSEs. Students with good A-levels stood to earn additional lifetime earnings of £136,000 because of demand for good mathematicians.

It is claimed that City banks are being forced to recruit as many as seven out of every eight employees from overseas because of a shortage of candidates with decent maths skills.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on children, said: "This is a damning critique of maths education in this country. Our education system is too often failing to get the basics right, which risks damaging the national economy. There is a serious concern that political meddling has led to a dumbing down of maths education."

The National Union of Teachers said the influence of targets and league tables had fuelled the decline, although they attacked the report as "prejudiced".

Jim Knight, the schools minister, said: "We agree that our culture does not value maths and mathematical skill highly enough and we know that employers are increasingly demanding sound numeric knowledge, but let's be clear: both GCSE and A-level maths are rigorous and challenging qualifications.

"Standards are carefully monitored by a watchdog which is independent of ministers … to make sure they remain world-class.