Thunder

Steph was working in a school today where they were looking at using ICT to support addition. Among a variety of other resources, she was planning to use Excel to produce addition questions similar to this:

I thought I would try and be smart and use the ‘=randbetween()’ function to generate the numbers and use the ‘=if()’ function to check the number entered by the student is correct. Unfortunately when you press enter to get the ‘=if()’ function to check the number is correct it randomises the original numbers again. I was wondering if anyone (Tim?) knew of a way to keep both bits of functionality i.e. random numbers and checking of answers. My working progress can be downloaded from here.

When I want to perform a basic calculation I tend to spark up Excel and type it into one of the cells, this might become a thing of the past thanks to a post on Lifehacker.

You can use Firefox 2’s suggest-as-you type Google search box as an instant calculator. Simply type your mathematical formula into the search box and you’ll get your answer even before you hit the equals sign.

After reading through Mike Temple’s Open Resource Centre I came across a link to the Juice Analytics blog that contains several postings about Excel.

I particularly like the idea of the in-cell bar charts and the follow up post, that takes the original post further based on ideas left in the comments to the first post. The example below shows a quick illustration of this.

What a simple but effective idea of using the ‘REPT’ function and a little change to the font.