Resourceaholic: 5 Maths Gems #201

1. Volumes of Revolution

My excellent A level student Samarth made a website volumesofrevolution.co.uk. He has very kindly shared it so that A level Further Maths teachers can use it in lessons when teaching volumes of revolution.

The website is very easy to use. You can create piecewise functions to make some interesting solids, and there’s transparency settings to allow two different functions to be seen one inside the other. You can play and pause an animation of the rotation being performed, and sign in with Google to save projects. 

To minimise Samarth’s costs (he’s heading off to university this September!), the website will only run on weekdays. He’s also included a buymeacoffee link to help keep the website  running. I’m very proud of Samarth and hugely impressed by his level of skill and attention to detail in creating this website. 

2. Clumeral

Emma Lark showed me the lovely puzzle site clumeral.com made by David Lark and Jamie Evawin. You work out the three digit numbers using clues and a process of elimination. Once you do today’s puzzle you get access to the archive. I think both maths teachers and students will really enjoy these puzzles!

3. A Level Resources

Because most of the maths teachers frequently posting on Bluesky are A level teachers, I always have loads of lovely A level resources to share in my gems posts these days! Here are some I’ve spotted recently:

Gabriel Sobrino emailed me about the website riddleoftheday.org. Riddle of the Day is an independent bilingual site publishing one logic or mathematical puzzle each day, with progressive hints and fully explained solutions. I thought this might be helpful for maths clubs and competitions in schools.

Riddles are classified by difficulty level. For example here’s one of the easier ones:

5. Constructions
@giftedhko.bsky.social has started writing a monthly newsletter for her department. Her July 2026 issue focused on construction:

Helen has some fantastic construction resources on mathshko.com.

 

I also spotted some constructions tasks on Transum when reading their latest newsletter. Their updated constructions activities give students the chance to practise compass skills, with each task leading to a measurable result: students complete the construction on paper, measure a length or angle, and enter their answer online for immediate marking. 

Whilst on Transum I spotted this cheating poster, updated to mention AI – I think it’s worth talking to students about this in September (particularly A level students).

Update
On the last two days of the summer term I had the privilege of attending an event hosted by XTX Markets and Purposeful Ventures. You may already be aware of XTX’s generous charitable donations in the sector, supporting organisations such as UKMT, Axiom Maths, Maths Horizons and Dr Frost (if you’re interested in finding out more, read mathsexcellencefund.org, and XTX’s philanthropy page). Over the course of the residential event, which was held at the very quirky but beautiful Brockett Hall in Hertfordshire, we discussed how to build more future mathematicians. 

For me it was incredibly worthwhile to consider the whole ‘talent pipeline’ from primary school through to PhD. For example on Thursday we broke into small groups and I ended up spending most of the day in a pair with Tom Crawford (his YouTube channel is popular with my students!) discussing in great depth how we can get more A level students to choose maths degrees. I loved how intellectually challenging this event was for me – I had the opportunity to do a lot of deep thinking and generate solutions to big problems. I really enjoy this kind of thing. I also loved catching up with a number of people who I haven’t seen in years, and meeting lots of new people with fascinating jobs. There were plenty of attendees who work closely with schools, including people who do some teaching in schools as part of their jobs, but I was the only classroom teacher at the event – I hope I did a good job of representing my profession. I’m very grateful to XTX for the invitation.

Exciting New Project

It was good to see Craig Barton at this event – we always have lots of ideas for how we can support secondary maths teachers, and this time we’ve come up with something which we think is going to be brilliant. I don’t want to give any spoilers here, but watch this space because we’ll be launching it really soon. It’s aimed at Heads of Maths and aspiring Heads of Maths. I genuinely think it’s going to be a game changer.

Future Events

La Salle’s maths conference dates for 2026/27 are:

• 5th September 2026 – Maghull High School, Liverpool (tickets now on sale)
• 14th November 2026 – Trinity Academy, Barnsley
• 20th March 2027 – Penrice Academy, St. Austell
• 5th June 2027 – The Duston School, Northampton

I can’t make the first one unfortunately but I hope to be at others!

I will definitely be at BCME, which falls in October half term for me. I hope to see lots of you there. Make sure you apply for a bursary!

As the weather has been so relentlessly hot this year, I will leave you with a great example of a misleading graph to share with students.