How does one capture the imagination of today’s learners with a discipline that many of them have already categorised as ‘boring’ by their 11th birthday? How can such a discipline hope to compete with other, more ‘glamorous’ subjects – let alone with all of the other distractions that vie for students’ attention such as video games and music?

At Learnalot we decided the best way to tackle this problem was to fuse maths with video game-style graphics and music together to create role-based scenarios where the student was tasked with solving a particular problem.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
- Benjamin Franklin

Whether saving the world from a giant asteroid, ridding a haunted house of ghosts or recapturing escaped convicts, our learners are presented with a problem and then asked to solve it by using maths skills that are hand-picked from around the curriculum to create believable and valuable activities.

Performance is tracked for teachers and parents to monitor and scores are displayed on ranked leaderboards, promoting friendly rivalry between classmates and peers from around the world. With improving their position on the global leaderboards a powerful incentive, our learners repeatedly play through the activities and games in order to perfect their skills and shave valuable seconds off their times.

The learner is always presented with a fresh problem as the questions and underlying data are randomly generated, so the process is always about perfecting skill and increasing knowledge and never about simply remembering previous answers.

Learnalot allows teachers to forget about preparation and marking and focus on delivering the best possible lesson as each resource also comes with supporting worksheets, teacher’s notes and lesson plans – which have all been prepared by experienced teachers.

You can sign up to Learnalot’s basic package for free just by filling an application form or you can become a subscriber and get access to our exclusive premium content as well. A 20% subscription discount is running until the end of April.

There is also a demo resource available on the website complete with supporting documents should you wish to sample the software without even registering.

With 10% of the UK’s schools already signed up just weeks after launch, Learnalot is proving a hit with teachers, parents and students alike. Register today and see for yourself how successful Learnalot is at engaging learners of all ages with maths.

Not happy with the transfer rates I get with my Thecus N4100Pro, I decided to look into what could possibly be the problem. It turns out that with overheads, the maximum transfer rate I’ll get from it is around 8-10mb/sec – if I’m lucky. Since I deal with large files on a regular basis, this has already gotten to the point where it’s beyond doing my head in, so I decided to upgrade my router (which doubles as a switch for 3 devices) to a gigabit model. That way I could expect transfer rates more along the lines of 70mb/sec, apparently*.

* I say apparently because while the maths behind that increase ratio does make sense, the maths also predicts transfer rates of more like 12.5mb/sec on a 100mbit line – so to be getting 8-10mb must mean there’s quite an overhead involved…

Anyway, after looking around I settled on a D-Link Xtreme N Gigabit DIR-655 and promptly searched for some prices on Google Products.

PIXmania was the first name that I’d heard of before (and bought from previously), so although they weren’t quite the cheapest I decided to go with them – the power of brand recognition working a treat. PIXmania had it for £79.90 including VAT, so I went to the site, added it to my basket and went to checkout. Just then Firefox crashed, so when it loaded back up I manually navigated to PIXmania’s site and searched for the router. To my amazement the router was now £96.98 including VAT! That’s a 21% increase in price, with the only difference being that on the first occasion I was referred from Google Products and on the second there was no referral.

I went back to Google Products and did the search again from there. Sure enough, the router came up again for £79.90, so this time I went in and bought the router from there. I checked out, paid via PayPal and now have an email receipt for £79.90.

It would seem that PIXmania is slashing prices on price comparison websites to make themselves more competitive, yet hiking them up again to non-referrals who are unlikely to have compared their prices before making a purchase. The moral of the story here is to always use price comparison websites whenever you’re making a purchase online!