Professional Development

The way students see and visualise numbers, especially as represented in space, seems to have interesting effects on the way they are able to manipulate them. There is a great deal of research on estimation and the number line, but only a little on representations of number in board games - but the few studies we have point to some intriguing results. Lucy Rycroft-Smith shares a research-informed wander through her board game collection, considering the possible implications of design choices in terms of representing numbers in number lines in various board games.

 She is studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, considering ideas of knowledge brokering – how, what, when, where and why we communicate research to mathematics teachers. Her other research interests include gender, sexualities and identity, feminism, decolonisation, curriculum design, board gaming, teaching discrete mathematics, representations of mathematics, maths and the arts, and professional development. She is the author of The Equal Classroom: Life-Changing Thinking About Gender (2019) and co-editor of Flip the System UK: A Teachers’ Manifesto (2017).

Ages: Primary, Secondary