I Wonder ... What If ...?

When were you last curious? What was it that provoked your curiosity? What compelled you to explore further?

All humans are naturally curious. Curiosity "encourages progress, innovation and creativity. It has led to the biggest ideas and innovations in science, mathematics, computing and design and technology." (Cross et al., 2016). As teachers, we want to nurture our students' mathematical curiosity so they grow into creative, flexible problem-solvers.

One way to nurture this curiosity is by providing the right hook to draw students in. That hook might be an image, a manipulative or an intriguing question. For our current Primary and Secondary features, we have chosen a selection of tasks that contain a variety of hooks. Each task is accompanied by teachers' resources, which suggest questions that might emerge or that you could use to prompt your students' thinking. 

We envisage that these tasks will prompt students to pose questions such as:

• How does that work?
• Can I recreate it?
• Are there different ways to solve it?
• I wonder what would happen if...?

We hope you and your students enjoy working on the tasks. We are looking forward to sharing their solutions, and any questions they were prompted to ask. Perhaps they will make us all wonder, and ask "What if...?"


References:

Cross, A., Borthwick, A., Beswick, K., Board, J. and Chippindall, J. (2016) Curious Learners in Primary Maths, Science, Computing and DT. London: Sage.