Technical Help

Using NRICH with a small screen

The NRICH website was designed to neatly fit a small computer screen, but it will adapt to work for any screen or device size, including laptops, phones, and tablets. If it doesn’t look right to you, try resizing your browser wider or narrower to see if the layout looks better to you.

The website layout does change at some screen sizes to allow everything to fit on the screen. For example, on some pages, the sidebar moves or disappears on small screens like phones. If you’re finding it difficult to use on a phone, we recommend using NRICH on a laptop or desktop computer.

In most browsers, you can also adjust the browser zoom controls to reduce the page to fit.

Printing

In most modern browsers you should get the best results by choosing File > Print from your browser menu, or pressing “Ctrl” + “P” together, or “Cmd” + “P” if you’re using an Apple Mac.

Devices and Browsers

You may experience some issues with the NRICH website if you’re using a very old or unusual browser. Upgrading your browser is often the quickest way to resolve technical problems.

Displaying Mathematical Notation

We use MathJAX to display mathematical notation. We write maths using TeX or LaTeX, which is then processed by MathJAX - a javascript library - running inside your browser. Right clicking on any mathematical notation will give you a menu where you can adjust your display.

HTML5 Interactivities (or apps)

Until 2020, the NRICH site featured a number of games and tools which used a technology called Flash. You might think of these as apps, we call them interactivities. Due to the discontinuation of Flash, the vast majority of these have been recreated in HTML5, which is more modern and secure. There are also a number of completely new ones.

If you remember using an old Flash interactivity but can’t find it on the site now, feel free to contact us to see if it has been recreated or if it’s still due for development.

There is a purple cog symbol in the top right corner of most HTML5 interactivities; this is there to give you access to settings which you can change and potentially get more out of the interactivity you are using.

You can also use this function to open a version of the interactivity in a resizable window, which may be useful for example if you’re presenting on a very large screen and you want to make it as large as possible.

GeoGebra Interactives

Some of our interactive content is based on the free GeoGebra software. If you are having difficulty loading these resources, check that your computer or tablet can access the GeoGebra website. All of our GeoGebra resources are available on the NRICH GeoGebra page.

How 'Search NRICH' works

There are lots of ways to find material on NRICH. You may be looking for material linked from the Primary and/or Secondary curriculum mapping documents, in which case you should start there. For most other purposes - whether you want to search through text, titles, or topics - it's best to start by typing some words into the Search NRICH box.

It helps a little to know how this works...

Using the Search NRICH box

The NRICH search system will do its best to find problems, topics, and other content that matches what you’re looking for. Here are some tips to get it to work best for you:

• If you aren’t sure the exact name of the page you’re looking for, keep your search short. For example, if you’re looking for a problem about counting primes, search “primes” or “counting primes” rather than “counting how many primes there are”
• The NRICH search system has two ways of searching, which are called “Search Results” and “Title Matches”, which show up as tabs on the search results pages. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the first tab, click on the second one.

Using Google to search NRICH

To do this, type “site:nrich.maths.org” together with your search in the Google search bar, and you will get results only from NRICH. For example, “site:nrich.maths.org primes”.

The advantage is that Google has better algorithms to find near matches than are supported by our database. The disadvantage is that results are ranked by Google rather than by us. If it helps you, use it.