Primary Maths Day - 16th of May

Math Up the Olympics! Part 2

Discuss Decimals and Fractions Many Olympic medals are won or lost by tiny increments of time, distance, or points. In the 2004 games, for instance, Dwight Phillips (USA) won the men's long jump with a leap of 8.59m, while second place went to John Moffitt (USA) with a distance of 8.47m. Use figures like these to explain how decimals relate to fractions: 0.59m is the same thing as 59/100m.
Slip in an introduction to precision in measurement while talking to your child. Explain how the Olympic Games have changed throughout their history because of improvements in technology. Just fifty years ago, for example, stopwatches could only measure time up to an accuracy of 0.1 seconds—so if two runners finished a race within 0.1 seconds of each other, it was impossible to determine which athlete had the faster time. Today, computers are used instead of stopwatches—and they can measure time up to an accuracy of 0.001 seconds. That's a hundred times more precise, and it makes it much easier to know who's really won an event.  

Go Over Graphing Choose a sport, athlete, or country to follow over the course of the Olympic Games, and use the data you and your child collect in order to create a graph. For instance, your child can compile a graph demonstrating how many medals are won by any country on each day of the games. Or, create a graph showing the best daily scores that are recorded in a particular event. Talk to your kids about how graphs make it easy to see the overall trend of a person's or a country's achievements. You might also point out how a graph can clearly reflect an upper limit on human abilities. (No one is ever going to be able to swim the 100-meter backstroke in just 20 seconds, for example, and that particular point on the graph would therefore be very far away from the line showing the best times.)