As part of the BAMC, the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nottingham held a schools outreach day called “Meet the Mathematicians“. This was a day of talks and a lunchtime session including interesting stalls, examples of mathematics research, a showcase of mathematical puzzles, a maths trail and a prize quiz.

As e-learning chap in the School, it was my job to operate the online prize quiz. The questions were written by Joel Feinstein and encoded to Questionmark Perception from a previous open day quiz. The questions were both mathematical and mathematics general knowledge (history and so forth). The computer suite was set up in the morning. All I had to do was be on hand to make sure nothing went wrong. We had a minor panic when no one had attempted the quiz half way through lunch, followed by increased signage and then a secondary panic when there was a queue and more computers had to be logged on. Apart from that it ran very smoothly. My role then was to write down the names of the top two scorers and slip them to Joel in an envelope (awards ceremony-style) during the panel discussion.

I think the day was good for the students who attended and for the School. It is always pleasing to see outreach events but a shame there aren’t more of them.

Meet the Mathematicians next year will be at Heriot-Watt University in connection with BAMC 2010 at the Maxwell Institute (Edinburgh/Heriot Watt).