The Maths Olympics

From the 26th of July to the 11th of August 2024, Paris will be hosting the Summer Olympic Games. In 2024 four new events have been added to the program they are: breaking (so interested to watch this!), sport climbing, skateboarding, and surfing. Three events have been removed: baseball, softball and karate!

Every 4 years, I love nothing more than watching the Olympics. I am in constant awe of the hard work, persistence and resilience every athlete has shown to just to be selected to compete at the Olympics. Seeing the emotion play out as they all try their best to achieve their goals is the best 'reality TV' going around!

I love hearing the 'story' behind each athlete and listening to them in post-event interviews reflecting on their journey of sacrifice and hard work to achieve their dream. I grew up playing competitive sport and always dreamed of making the Olympics. Although I didn't make it that far, I still carry with me the lessons I learned from sport which I believe help me every day in my life and work. Hard work, humility, fairness, determination, dealing with winning/losing and teamwork are all great life skills I refined through countless tournaments, races and training sessions. I look forward to watching the athletes push themselves in Paris and I wish them all the very best!  

In keeping with the Olympics theme, I wanted to share some simple ideas you might like to use in your classroom. When I was a classroom teacher, every time the Olympic Games came around, I would take the opportunity to organise a ‘Maths Olympics’. The students loved the activities and importantly there was always some great mathematical thinking happening.

In this blog I wanted to share a few events you might like to try.

Set Up

Students work in groups of three and rotate through the activities. You can either have a task card or a short video at each station explaining the activity. You may like to invite parent volunteers to be involved as referees at each station.

The Events

The 'events' are suitable for students from F-6. The older students can use formal instead of informal units to complete all the required measurements.

The following are the resources you will need for the ‘Maths Olympics’ events. 

These are the events (in no particular order):

Cotton Bud Archery

Draw a target on the concrete with chalk. Each competitor has three cotton buds and needs to throw them from the start line. Their score is the total of where the three throws land (try saying that three times quickly!) For older students you could use large numbers or decimal or fraction values in the circles.

Cotton Ball Shot Put

Each competitor has three cotton balls. They take turns to throw the balls from the start line. Each competitor measures and record their longest throw (using formal or informal units, depending on age).

Straw Javelin

Each player has three straws. In front of them are four plastic/paper plates marked 1-4. Their score is the total points of where the three throws land. For older students you could use decimal or fraction values on the plates)

For example, in the image below the competitor’s score is 3+3+2=8

Straw and Cup Race

Competitors each use their own straw to blow a plastic cup across a table. First cup to fall off the table at the other end is the winner. This could also be a timed event, where each student completes the task individually and is timed by the other students using a stopwatch. Fastest time wins.

Long Jump

Competitors stand at the start line and complete a standing jump. Each competitor is permitted to have three jumps and they measure their longest jump. Competitor with the longest jump wins. 

Data Collection

Provide students with a simple sheet to write their scores (older students should be encouraged to create a table themselves (or use a spreadsheet)- this is an important skill in data collection and presentation). Provide time at the end of each rotation for the competitors to collate the results and award first, second and third place (ordinal number, tick!) (apologies, I cannot get this photo to rotate- so if you could just turn your head to look at it that would be great!)

Other Ideas- Symmetry

As part of the Paris Olympics amazing pictograms have been released to represent each sport.

They are the perfect way to explore symmetry and could be a great way to infuse some maths into your Art session! You can watch a cool video matching the sports to the pictograms and if you scroll to the bottom of this webpage you can see a little more about the design process. You can download the images here. 

Slow Reveal Graphs

I love a good Slow Reveal Graph to encourage the development of some statistical literacy and these two are fabulous examples that relate to the Olympics.

Here is the link to the Slow Reveal resources associated with this graph.

Here is the link to the Slow Reveal resources associated with this graph.

Potato Olympics

I have also heard great things about the Potato Olympics activities created by the Australian Mathematics and Science Institute (AMSI).

I hope you and your students have great fun participating in the Maths Olympics!

Go Australia!

Have a great week.

Ange:)

PS: If you are looking for a PDF summary of this blog to easily share with your colleagues, here it is!