Eratosthenes, the ancient Greek mathematician, was the ‘inventor’ of the Leap Day. He was also the first person to accurately calculate the circumference of the Earth. Here’s a fantastic way to use that latter calculation, add a touch of modern technology and generate an enaging lesson idea for some of your more able Key Stage 2 Children.

This one may be a bit controversial. Imagine a situation where we combined maths and PE, not as a one-off, but as part of a long-term programme, Okay? Here are the questions… Is there really any benefit? Which one gains, maths or PE? Which one loses out? Is it a purposeful, long-term strategy or a woolly minded bit of hokum?

Here, Alex Bellos offers a potentially very helpful reply to that readily asked question, “Why are we learning about this?”

Google+, you can’t ignore it any more. At first it seems a little complicated – but that’s because it’s so feature-rich. Here’s a quick overview of the key feature, together with details of how to find out more… don’t be the last on on-board!

We get so many extremely kind comments about the quality of the mathsticks.com maths resources that I decided to share some of the most recent ones here…

You may already have these wonderful little bead strings, they may be gathering dust somewhere, or you may be using them every day… Whichever it is, here’s a quick tutorial of how to make your own, and why!

January 21st is, for those of us in Europe, Australia, Latin America and India, a palindromic date (21.1.12) using three ’1′s and two ’2′s. As such, it seems appropriate to link these numbers to a seemingly simple number problem…

First a six-faced cube floats – then we discover that it only has three faces and our eyes are being tricked!
It looks like it’s time to take this youtube optical illusion and challenge our children to reproduce the effect for themselves.

Welcome to the shiny, new blog space for Mathsticks.com. We have decided to place the blog in a separate space to leave more room for the resources and also to enable us to expand the nature of our blog posts – adding more ideas, news and information…