Another Puzzle for the Today Programme!

I set another puzzle for Radio 4's Today programme and it was featured this morning (Monday, 6th April 2020).

It goes like this...

"Doc note, I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."

Bletchley Park Codebreaker Peter Hilton constructed this impressive 51-character palindromic sentence, allegedly in response to a challenge set by a fellow Codebreaker. Palindromic numbers work in the same way: the same digits in the same order whether you read them backwards or forwards.

What is the 51st Palindromic number?

You can find the puzzle (with a link to a solution) on the Today Programme's website, here.

As with many puzzles the solution is debatable depending on some starting assumptions. Feel free to discuss your assumptions (and how these might change the answer) in the comments. Teachers, I'd love to hear how you might use any of the ideas or topics featured (even tangentially) in your own teaching!

Also, please post your favourite palindromes!

Research Poster: Digital Mathematics Resources and Museums

Back in September I asked for some maths teachers to take part in the trial of a mathematics resource that I had created and was trialling as part of the work towards my PGCert in Digital Leadership.

With massive thanks to the teachers and students who took part, I completed the project which formed the second assignment towards the first of two modules in the course. Our brief was to present our report in the form of a research poster (with a creatively loose definition of what that means).

M2, M4, M6, M8, Motorway!

I've always^[1] wondered how far it was possible to go staying only on consecutively numbered motorways in the UK. I've also been looking for a reason to fiddle around with Graphviz since the eternally helpful Colin Wright pointed me towards it a while ago.

So I found a database of the UK's motorways and created a graph:

Optimistic October: Day 31 - What Gives You Hope for the Future?

It's the end of the month, the end of Optimistic October, and it's Hallowe'en...

And what is scarier, I ask you, than...

But anyway. Rules are rules:

Friends. I have a small (ideal) number of excellent friends.
Science. It's awesome and if we do it properly we can solve all sorts of problems.
The belief that most people, deep down, want to be better.

Optimistic October: Day 30 - Purpose

I'm... supposed to have a sense of purpose?

I'm never quite sure what things like this mean, but that just gives me an opportunity to define it however like, doesn't it?

I guess a "sense of purpose" is when you feel like you're doing something that has a point to it, and I'm feeling that this is more of an external thing than an internal one: giving something back to the world, rather than making personal achievements.

I feel most like I have purpose when I'm teaching, so a goal set in response to today's challenge should probably have something to do with that. Generally, my goal is...

To be the best educator that I can be.

... but that's not exactly measurable. Part of my desire to undertake postgraduate study was so that it could provide some structure in working towards this goal, so I'm going to work damned hard on completing that as well as I can. As well as this, and at least equally important, is my network of educators that I keep tabs on via Twitter. I don't engage as much as I probably should with the broader teaching community, but I learn a lot, keep up to date, and am forced to think (and re-think) about various aspects of teaching and education. It is genuinely an excellent tool through which to build a learning network on various themes.