Maths: What’s the Point?

On Tuesday 25 April, the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science ran ‘Maths: What’s the Point’ for year 9 students who attend our Partner and KMPF schools. The event was designed to offer students a hands-on introduction as to how Maths is used outside the classroom, with sessions being both fun and educational.

As well having the opportunity to meet with some of our undergraduate ambassadors, the visiting students were involved with a mixture of sessions including the Art of Codebreaking, Fraud Detection Using Statistics, and Topology & Play-Doh. These sessions were led by our experienced ambassadors who are currently studying across a range of our degree programmes.

Feedback from the activities were extremely positive; for example, the Codebreaking session was described as ‘exciting’ and that ‘students were proactive in encrypting and decrypting their own messages’. The Fraud Detection session had similar positive comments from a teacher who attended: ‘Presenter was very engaged and knowledgeable about the topic. Task was engaging and set at an appropriate level for the students’. The students who attended the event found these activities really beneficial when thinking about studying Maths at a higher level and considering how the subject is applied to real life scenarios.

For more information about this activity, please contact outreach@kent.ac.uk