Teaching children is hard, mathematics in particular. It’s all too easy for a student to shrug and say, “I’m just no good at maths.” Perhaps the most important way we can support them is by showing that they can always get better with practice, and one of the great promises of educational technology is to help busy teachers assign targeted and achievable tasks… but while it’s easy to gamify some parts of mathematics, it’s harder to produce something that meets every student at their level. My job at a UK educational research company is to do just that. We work in local classrooms to design and evaluate mathematics lessons and we produce personalised homework every week. As we work with more schools, it’s increasingly important to quickly try new things and carry out experiments to check that what we’re doing is effective. I’d like to share how I have increasingly been using Julia in my investigations into effective mathematics homework, giving you an inside view on what it has made easy (and what still causes pain).
