COVID-19 has totally disrupted the way we think about personal and public financial practices, with real implications for how schools prepare a financially capable citizenry. 
 
Through her ongoing work in the field, Carly Sawatzki has found that young people’s observations and experiences with money can influence the way they respond to money-related mathematics problems. The extent of financial loss and hardship being experienced by Australian families means that it is more important than ever to teach money and financial mathematics in research-informed, practical and sensitive ways.
 
In this keynote address, Carly will share examples of real world learning tasks that meaningfully connect the teaching of mathematics and numeracy in consumer, economic, and financial contexts. Through these tasks and the teaching strategies Carly models, you will deep dive into financial mathematics and discover new opportunities to engage students in applying mathematics to the sorts of financial problems and decisions life throws up. Carly’s insights will make you laugh, cry, and want to teach financial mathematics differently.

We have spent the last year researching how to teach fractions, trialling what the research says on thousands of students and making improvements. We found there was a disconnect between how students were taught fractions in primary school and the assumptions high school teachers made about what students knew. We want to share what we found, focusing on the misconceptions that hold students back and how to overcome them. This includes specific visual models that can do a lot of the heavy lifting in building conceptual understanding. So, if you have ever been frustrated that some students just don’t get fractions, no matter what you try, this is the session for you.

Widgets and User defined functions are extremely helpful and powerful tools for responding to technology enabled examinations. Widgets are a big time saver and are very easy to access. Writing widgets on TI Nspire does not need any coding or programming knowledge or skills as widgets use all the built in CAS tools that teachers and students may already be using. Use of widgets adds to efficiency and performance. The participants attending this session will learn to create widgets and will also be provided with some very powerful widgets.

If we consider mathematics to be a language of its own, then the introduction of letters to a syntax that has, up until that point, been entirely dominated by numbers, can be foreign and unintelligible to learners. Algebra is formally introduced in Year 7, and with this leap from numerical to symbolic representation, a large portion of students start having great difficulty interpreting mathematics; A common finding in research is that the introduction of Algebra in early secondary school (Years 7-8) contributes to a decline in a large number of students’ math results due to inabilities to interpret this new mathematical language. Visual patterns and manipulatives are a resource that can move students from being numerical to figural generalisers as they help students make connections between figures, symbols and real-life contexts. In this session, Danijela and Helen will demonstrate a few such resources.

This workshop will provide a way to think about the teaching and learning of equations, that will simplify both what students see and how they approach the process.

Discover a logical and engaging method for teaching students how to approach mathematical reasoning with Bit Maths – a new resource for junior secondary. Too often, students transition from primary to secondary school without having been taught how to reason mathematically – leaving them under confident and disengaged as they encounter more complex problems. When asked to complete problems or inquiries that require them to apply reasoning skills, such as "proving", "explaining", "generalising", or "justifying", they don't know what to do. In this presentation, you will learn how to scaffold a meta-cognitive approach to reasoning, that will not only help students solve complex reasoning questions and communicate their answers appropriately – but also ignite their passion for mathematics in and out of the classroom.