Support and Development of the NRICH Mathematics Enrichment Website

The NRICH website publishes free mathematics education enrichment material for ages 5 to 19 / in 2004/5 the website attracted over 1.7 million site visits (more than 49 million hits). The NRICH material encourages creative, confident approaches to mathematical thinking and can be used with all ability ranges. We also encourage pupils to send in individual solutions to problems for publication on the site, adding to the sense of an online mathematical community. NRICH seeks to develop core mathematical skills and an understanding, at a level appropriate for school-age audiences, of many of the areas of mathematical activity funded by EPSRC (e.g. number theory - through investigating properties of numbers, integers, factors, counting, rational, irrational and real numbers, primes, modular arithmetic; algebra, geometry, statistics, mechanics, discrete mathematics and combinatorics and the history of mathematics).The Rt Hon Charles Clarke MP, former Secretary of State for Education, recently described NRICH as 'a rich and creative supply of resources'. The project has been repeatedly commended by the DfES. Most recently we were cited in the Smith report on Post-14 Maths Education and singled out for mention in the DfES's response, Making Mathematics Count (June 2004). The MMP's activities were specifically cited as a means of improving and supporting teachers' subject knowledge in the Transforming Secondary Education paper circulated to all secondary schools in February 2003, while our resources were also recommended in the 1998 DfEE report on the National Numeracy Strategy.The funding requested from EPSRC would provide part support for the ongoing work of developing enrichment content material for the website, tagging it against National Curriculum descriptors and developing and maintaining the website's structure and search facilities. It would also provide part support for our planned new developments for the site. These focus on further enhancing the benefits of the site for teachers, and include exploring means of encouraging more structured use of the resources by teachers through providing mechanisms to deliver 'packages' of linked resources, and developing interactive learning environments providing multiple problem solving purposes. Recent developments on the site include the delivery of learning environments to support the teaching and learning of mathematics through problem solving. We also plan to further develop our teachers' notes accompanying problems, to give more creative guidance to teachers on their use in the classroom and the mathematical context of the resources, and, in response to teacher feedback, we are planning to map resources against the National Numeracy Framework.