Dr Oliver Nyquist has always had a love of the arts, science, maths. He worked all over the world as director of many international art galleries and museums. Since early this year he has decided to retire so he can help his children with child minding and be more involved in the education of his grand kids. After a lot of yellow childrens paint and glitter being applied to his Eames chairs and Persian carpets, Nyquist decided to turn his second garage into a dedicated kids education and play room with stunning success.

Dr Nyquist hired designer Pip Charcuterie from London Design studio Me&MoreMe to come up with the design concept for the space. The brief included creating a space that fostered a sense of fun and enjoyment for learning, a space that was light and bright with plenty of storage space and low bench spaces for working at. The space also had to be easily divided and separated from the rest of the garage to hide Nyquist’s collection of vintage motorcycles from little hands. This last problem was elegantly solved through the use of a large set of sliding doors running on Brio sliding door tracks. These doors slide into each other to virtually disappear when opened, yet close off the space perfectly when class in session.

The space works wonderfully well, with a large bright blue custom made set of cupboards running the length of the room to house all sorts of science experiments, books and art materials neatly and reduce the visible clutter. There is a custom made adjustable trestle table running the length of the room at a very child friendly 500mm high at the moment, which can be heightened as the children grow. There is also a one entire wall painted in chalkboard paint for the kids to draw, and solve maths problems on. A large skylight was added to the south side of the ceiling which gives plenty of natural light to the space.

All in all it’s a great addition to the house, turning a utility space into a beautiful space for learning and creating.

To my mind one of the big factors in primary school kids being super switched on today comes down to the amazing access to virtually unlimited resources today. With the advent of the internet, has come easy online information sourcing and access to excellent maths resources and fun ideas for maths activities. Think about it as moving from what was once available in the local library to accessing book shelves that extend forever around the world.

A large part of today’s kids intelligence is also due to the way subjects are taught at schools. There has been a seismic shift away from rote learning and memorisation to more problem based learning. This particularly relates to maths teaching plans and the way kids are taught to develop strong addition mental strategies and multiplication mental strategies to be able to work on maths problem solving autonomously. If you are a teacher looking for new ideas for your maths lesson plans, look no further than alearningplaceateachingplace for a host of great resources and instructional videos. Search by concept or by grade to make your lessons fun and engaging and have the kids getting a deep understanding.

We are also valuing the contribution of children more these days. Gone are the days where kids should not speak unless spoken to. Children in most parts of the world are today free to do pretty much whatever they set their minds to as parents and teachers encourage them to pursue their dreams whatever they may be.

A good way to introduce such maths problems is to give the problem to the class but not tell them that it is actually unsolvable until they have been working on it for around ten minutes. This creates a change in the students perspective, as what was seemingly a straight forward problem in arithmetic turns into being basically unsolvable, thereby questioning the very basis of maths problem solving concepts they have previously relied on.

Using unsolved maths problems has the effect of allowing students to let themselves break free somewhat of the commonly held notion that there is a “right” and “wrong” answer to everything, and indeed raises the question in their minds – does there need to be a correct answer at all? In my opinion, if the right and wrong answer idea is forced upon students, it inhibits them from developing their own addition mental strategies and to gain a deep understanding of maths concepts.

Furthermore, working on unsolved maths problems allows a student to relax, engage with the problem at hand without the pressure of needing to find the correct answer. This focuses the student’s subtraction mental strategies and lets them explore different maths problem solving techniques and key core concepts. Failure, is for want of a better word, expected and normal with success not coming in the form of finding the correct answer but rather in the depth of investigation done by the student. For the most part all my students love working on these problems. Hopefully, some of these problems stay unsolved for very long time.