Episode 4: Imaginary money, maths puzzles and audience segmentation models
Full transcript

 Welcome to the Talking Maths in Public podcast, a community podcast for members of the Talking Maths in Public network. TMiP is a UK network for maths communicators, with a conference every two years and a chat group for keeping in touch in between.  My name's Katie Steckles, and I'm a freelance maths communicator and member of the TMiP organising team. 

The podcast is a chance for members of the community to share their maths communication work and talk about the ways we communicate maths.  In this episode, we'll hear from Alison Flood from New Scientist magazine about the maths content they feature. We'll also hear from Sarah Marks about RedSTART, a charity teaching primary school children about financial literacy. 

And we'll chat with audience researcher Hannah Ford-Tomlinson and maths communication researcher Peter Rowlett about audiences and how we define them, whether for research or in deciding how best to communicate with them.  To see links to things discussed in this episode and more episodes, You can visit talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast.

First up, it's an interview with Alison Flood, who's the comment and culture editor of New Scientist magazine, about the ways maths is featured in the world's most popular weekly science publication. Cool, so I am talking to Alison Flood, who works for New Scientist. So Alison, can you tell us briefly what New Scientist is?

So New Scientist is a weekly magazine about popular science. It's not aimed specifically at scientists. It's for general public with a keen interest in science. So we cover everything from technology to nature, to the environment. We do some maths stuff. We have a news section, a features section, and then we have puzzles at the back as well. 

Excellent, and what is your role at New Scientist, and how long have you been doing that? 

I am comment and culture editor here, so I'm responsible for all of our reviews, I'm responsible for our opinion pieces, and I also do all of the back bits of the magazine, so puzzles, crosswords, the kind of reader writing sections, the funny bits as well. I've been here for about two and a half years now.  

Okay, so I guess the content of the magazine is mainly long articles about different scientific things, but you've also got this section at the back with shorter opinion pieces...

Exactly, yeah.  I guess the bit that I'm responsible for is not news and not features, everything else. Views from people, and fun bits. 

Yeah, okay. And so from what I've seen, New Scientist in the main sort of news part does quite often cover maths stories, like I've seen some of the big maths news stories have definitely had a piece in there. But I guess having this sort of more opinion based section is a way to get more maths content in when there isn't news happening, in the world of maths.

Yeah, I think so. 

Whenever we do news about maths or features about maths they are read really well. People really love maths stories, I think. The bit at the back is supposed to be the sort of try your hand at things section. So that's why we have puzzles and crosswords, and why we also have a column that's a kind of, try it yourself at home column.

So we, in, in that column, it kind of rotates. We have gardening, we have cooking, and then we also have a maths column there, which is where our two maths writers tell us about the maths of everyday life. 

Yeah. So this is yet another segment of this podcast where I'm interviewing someone technically about a thing that I do.

So I'm one of those two writers and also Peter Rowlett, who is part of the Talking Maths in Public community as well. And I guess, yeah, so we have a once every, is it five weeks? Because there's five different segments that go in that but it's just like a one page, here's an interesting bit of maths.

And I guess with that we've tried to do a maths in real life kind of applications sort of thing. 

Exactly. So Katie has told us how we can use maths to cut up a pizza fairly no matter how many of us there are and she's also told us and this is one of our most popular articles we've had for a while how to use maths to get out of a maze  which isn't exactly everyday life but people seem to love it 

yeah there was a lot of discussion around that and i guess it's the kind of thing that everyone can have an opinion on like this is my method for getting out of a maze yeah and i guess so what we've tried to do with that is Obviously try and stick to the brief of things that are useful in real life to whatever extent you actually end up trying to get out of a maze often in real life.

But a lot of it is just an excuse to share an interesting thing and a nice sort of application of maths. 

Yeah, exactly. So more recently we had how to use maths to divide anything fairly and that got you to talk a bit about game theory, right? 

Yeah, and the sort of economics of what starts off as cutting a cake into pieces for different people that actually applies to like resources and bargaining between world powers and that sort of stuff.

And even divorces. 

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So you also mentioned you do the puzzle column. Yet again, somehow I've managed to get myself involved here. This was run by Rob Eastaway for quite a long time.

It was, so Rob did it for quite a while. Then we wanted a fresh approach. So I asked Katie if she would think about doing it and you were keen and you've taken a slightly different angle to Rob, but I think it works really well. So Rob had done us quite quite wordy questions, and you have - you can tell us what you, tell us.

Yeah, I'm just quite happy for it to just be a maths question, just how many numbers are there that have this property? And I'm I feel like what Rob was doing was trying to make it more accessible in that it was just a thing that you would read and you'd have to think about how to extract a puzzle from that and I've, rather than give that extra layer of challenge, I've just gone for, "here's some maths", but it's - actually we're doing like a three different levels, almost, so there's an easy first question, then something a bit more difficult, and then something meatier to get into, and I suspect there'll be some people who just look at the first one and go, "oh, I've done that, I can do a puzzle!" and then other people who go a bit further and take a little time to play with it a bit more. But yeah has that been well received? 

Yeah, we've had a lot of people write in to tell us to tell us what they think of it, and people seem to be liking it. What I wanted from the puzzle page is for Our readers to be able to attempt it, for people to be able to have a go and hopefully be able to do at least some of it and to be able to feel like they're smart when they've done it, to be able to think, I've managed to do a maths puzzle in New Scientist, great. So you don't want it to be so impossibly hard that that no one can crack it, or only like a degree level maths people can do it. You want it to be for anyone to be able to put their brain to it and have a good go. And that's why I like the kind of the three levels because hopefully everyone can have a bit of a stab at it, no matter their maths level.

Yeah, and I think between me and the sort of people who've been working on, because we've got a few different people who submit puzzles to set - I've got a little gang of people who do some testing for me that kind of look at the puzzles before we send them off. And I guess one of the things we've managed to do quite nicely is almost that sort of pedagogical thing of using the fact that you've got this easy first question. It's deliberately chosen as something that will get you thinking about the problem for the next part, so having done the first part, you've already done some of the work towards the second part, and that sort of maybe hooks you into- someone vaguely described me as a kind of drug dealer of maths. Like I give them a little easy thing to hook them in, and then once they're drawn into that, they'll then, they'll see the second part and they'll think, "oh I know how to do that, so I just need to do this, and this". And, theoretically, that, that's the kind of thing. I've actually had a few emails from teachers who said that "we've used your puzzles in our classroom" which is a nice, interesting development. Cause I guess with Rob's puzzles,  potentially teachers might share those with the classroom, but I guess if it's got more of that sort of formal structure to it, that it's like steps that you can work through that feels a little bit closer to a classroom problem, but obviously still in a very casual kind of doing a puzzle in your spare time kind of way.

Yeah. I think that Rob used to sometimes give his puzzles when he was testing them to see if they worked to some, to classes to see  how well they could solve them, which is quite fun. 

Yeah. And I guess it's a magazine that's available in all the shops and people can pick this up. And it's also on the website as well.

Yeah. And we have an app too. Yeah.

So I think one thing I always, cause my standard drum that I always beat when I'm talking about maths communication is, what's the audience? Like, how do we understand the audience for this? So like when you're putting maths content into the magazine, what kind of decisions do you make? How do you feel about your audience's approach to maths.  

I think our audience is pretty educated. 75 percent are educated to degree level. And the average age of our readers is 40, so they're older and educated. I think that 88 percent is ABC1, so they're quite a wealthy demographic, so all of those things are playing on my mind when I'm thinking about stuff. But with the maths, I'm not thinking these people are all people with a maths degree. I'm thinking they're people who are smart and interested and, let's pitch it not too high, but high enough that they'll challenge themselves.

Yeah, and I guess certainly with the puzzles, the fact that there's this extension to it, that you can stop at any point, that if someone is prepared to spend a whole afternoon wrestling with something, they absolutely can. And I guess with the column as well, we're trying to, we haven't got a lot of words there. We're not going to fully explain the entire concept, but we're giving people an introduction to the idea that if they wanted to go off and read more about it, they could almost certainly find further reading. 

Yeah, exactly. And with the column, what I like what I think works really well is if someone can read it and then be able to take something away that they'll go and tell people about.

So like, how to get out of a maze, you would definitely go and say to someone always turn right, or whatever it was the rule was. Or how to divide a pizza, now that always comes to mind for me, if I'm cutting up a pizza. So it's something that you would take away and pass on to people, a kind of delightful nugget about maths.

Yeah. And I really appreciate the fact that there's now space for a kind of maths column there because, it could be anything, right? There's so many different aspects of science that you could feature in there. But having this sort of the, this glimpse into how maths affects the world and is tied into all the things around us that you maybe wouldn't necessarily expect that maths would be involved or maybe you would, I don't know.

People may have a strong sense of that, but to, to give people a reminder, that maths is there sitting underneath all of these things. 

Yeah, and it does really well for us too. The column is really popular. People obviously want to know what maths is underlying the world.

It's really interesting to me because in terms of looking at my audience, I literally look at my audience with my eyes and I try and judge based on the faces I can see what sort of level people are at with maths, in terms of ages and that kind of thing. And I try, if I'm doing an event, I try and get the organizers to tell me like, how have you advertised this? Like what kind of people are expecting? But I guess you have actual real kind of demographic data. Certainly if you're looking at online logins, people will have an account. You can get that sort of background info. You can do surveys to to get that very specific information. So I guess that's a, it feels like a very nice thing to be able to say, we know this percentage of our readership has a degree or whatever. And that can really inform what you're doing. 

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And they're always very quick to tell us if they don't like things too. 

Yeah, I guess so you get like a lot of feedback about things that you put in the magazine...

We do. Lots of readers like to write in which is great. It's really great to have all of that contact with people. And I know that you've been in touch - some have written in about puzzles and it's been really nice that you and some of the setters have been able to say actually, "This is where you've gone wrong", or "this is how you're thinking about it differently, and this is why we did it this way". I think it's really nice to have that.  

Yeah. And like with the letters page, I think someone wrote in after the maze column to say, "have you considered doing mazes in three dimensions"...

That could be a future column, Katie.

Yeah. Potentially. Yeah. But yeah, that's, it's nice that is a two way conversation as well. Like even if you think of a magazine or a website as just being a place that information is put out. But yeah with that kind of.  community conversations around it as well.

I think New Scientist is really good at that. I used to work at the Guardian and I think New Scientist is much more devoted and dedicated to interacting with it, with its readers and finding out what they want.

I really like that about it. 

Cool. Thank you very much for taking the time to chat to us. And if people want to read New Scientist, I guess it's just newscientist.com. Exactly. Go down the shops. Come and read. Brilliant. Thanks. Cheers, Katie. 

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For our next segment, I'm joined by lecturer and maths education researcher Peter Rowlett, as well as audience researcher and freelance science communicator Hannah Ford-Tomlinson, as we dissect the way we define what an audience is. 

So I'm talking to Hannah Ford-Tomlinson, who is an audience researcher, and please Hannah, tell us what that is. What is that job?  

I would love to. So an audience researcher, basically for me anyway, so I work at the Science Museum group and I lead on the evaluation that takes place across the northern museums in the group. So that's looking at exhibitions, resources, events and essentially we do new evaluation, we do new audience research, but we also use existing evaluation and research to advocate for the needs of audiences.

So it's about understanding the people who are coming to the museum. And what they're getting out of it and how they're interacting with things.  

Absolutely. And also thinking about the people that aren't coming and why they might not be coming and how we can change or adapt what we're doing to meet the needs of more people. 

Okay, so what kind of audiences do you get there?  That's a really good question. A lot of different people come to the Science Museum group for lots of different reasons. And that's one of the things that we think about is why someone might come to visit and why that reason might be different to someone else visiting on the same day.

People also visit for different reasons on different days, which is very interesting. We think a lot about schools audiences. We think a lot about families independent adults as well. And all of those people.  I say, have different reasons, different motivations for visiting kind of any cultural institution, but for visiting a science museum particularly. 

Okay. And I guess part of your work in the research is understanding those audiences and helping to design exhibits and events and things, tailored to those audiences. 

Yeah, absolutely. So someone wanting to develop something new will come to my team and say, listen, we want to know more about this particular audience.

Can you do some front end research? So talk to people before we've made it to, so we can test out some of ideas. We also do what we call formative research. So prototyping. So someone has something that's underway, but not finished yet. We can test that out. And then when something's finished as well, we can do what we call a summative evaluation. So how has this gone? What can we learn for future work?

Cool. So I'm thinking about like when I'm doing a piece of maths communication, like I always think about who the audience is for this, like who I've got in the room, if I'm doing a talk, like what age group, what kind of level and ability and that kind of thing.

And this is actually something that we had to think about a lot harder recently when I was doing a piece of research with Peter Rowlett, who is also here. Hi, Peter.  

Hello. 

And Peter's been hiding in the corner but essentially, yeah we did a, do you want to tell us, Peter?

Tell us about the research project. 

I can tell you about, I can tell you about my friend Katie who came to work at Sheffield Hallam with me.  Yes. Yeah. You started working as a lecturer in our group.  We are mathematics lecturers teaching a maths course and there are people doing research in mathematics and in applications of mathematics.

But also one of the big interests in the group is maths education. So you and I got talking about how your. Interests as a maths communicator could align with that and the thing that we came up with was Looking into why people come to study maths at university and we did you will remember I feel very strange telling you about this thing that we did together  We did this initial piece of work that was about informal experiences with mathematics.

So playing games at home, or visiting places, or watching YouTube channels, or things like this. And the sort of impact that has on people's decision or not to take maths seriously.  And that not being the main aim of many of these activities, but nevertheless, it might have an influence anyway. And then that spun out and you applied for some money and I helped from the university to do a slightly larger project.

And what we did for that was that we collected a bunch of case studies from people doing different types of outreach. And we did some interviews with people who were doing it and got some people to write their own case studies.  And one of the things we wanted to do with that, when we published them, was to tag them in the way that you might tag a blog post or something.

And that got us thinking about, Audiences.  

Yeah, because I guess a lot of the different sort of case studies were on different forms of outreach. So we've got everything from like a cryptography day where people come into the UD and do activities through to an evening event for adults or just any and every type of potential kind of maths enrichment in different forms.

And how do we consistently define those audiences? Because they will be different people from different places for each one.  

Because you want everyone to read everything because it's all marvellous, but also you acknowledge that people have a limited amount of time. And if you're doing something with 16 to 18 year olds, you might not want to read the case studies by people who are working with primary school kids, for example.

So that sort of simple level, there's some sort of signposting for the audience of the booklet thinking about audiences. So we came up with this sort of scale, but then we were,  we taught, I remember that we talked quite a lot about.  There are different motivations as well as different people.

Yeah, I guess when people talk about doing a maths thing and you say, oh, who, who's it for, they will say year nine, or they will say an age group, and that's the way that people often think about what the audience is for a thing. But actually There's year nines and year nines, right?

So year nines in the first week of term year nines on a Friday afternoon, just before they're about to leave for the weekend, year nines in their own school or out of school. So we wanted a way to capture that aspect of it as well. And we ended up with a, a two dimensional array of possible audiences, 

yeah, not wanting to do things simply, but yeah, the other thing is that not everything is for school So we had this sort of school system that we actually did from preschool as well because I have a kid I have done taking him to a science fair when he was three, that sort of thing So we did it.

We did a sort of preschool. We did a primary or elementary depending on which part of the world you're in. Hopefully these terms start to make sense. But primary or elementary education, we did a sort of lower secondary or middle school, an upper secondary or high school, and then a sixth form or junior college. 

But then we did some outside of fourth  the sort of school structure of education. Of course, as university students, we put family in there because sometimes you're running something not for the kids, but for the kids and the parents together. And that's a different audience in a way. And then we got a bit lost and weren't sure what to do.

And we ended up with young adults and adults who are presumably, young adults are presumably also adults as our university students. It gets all very muddly, doesn't it? And then we put retired in there as well. Yeah. So those were the people, audiences, the sort of who you are. 

Yeah, and then we had this kind of second dimension going off, I guess at right angles to that, let's imagine it that was about sort of interest level.

Because within any of those age groups, you might have people who are not necessarily into maths. You'd hope if it's university students on a maths course that they would at least be slightly, but it might be university students not on a maths course.  So we had uninterested. Which is people who don't see maths as a thing that they are interested in.

Receptive, so potentially open to maths but not particularly going to seek something out. Engaged, which is enthusiastic about maths and actively seeking out things to do that are mathematical. And then expert, which is people who literally have, qualifications or work in maths or are insiders, in the world of mathematics, because that, I think, We acknowledged that some of the things that we were doing were for those different audiences and those kind of different levels of interest and that allowed us to pin down a lot more precisely who these things were for. 

And it's useful to think about this stuff when you're designing an activity, but also  when you're thinking about what, how to promote it, how to all of that other stuff as well. And so part of the reason why we wanted to talk about this is because Hannah is here and an expert in this kind of thing, and me and Peter very much just made this up to fit with the stuff that we were looking at, and I suspect if we had a different set of case studies we might have ended up going a different way with this.

And so I guess firstly, does this sound right? Is this something that's any good? And do you have any thoughts about this sort of structure of I guess, what would we call this, like an audience model? 

Yeah, it's basically, an audience segmentation model is how we tend to think about these things.

First of all, yes, it's great. I love it. I think it's a really simple, but hopefully really useful tool. I think age is often the simplest way that we separate people and that we segment them and we put them into these models. It just makes sense. It's fairly.  straightforward to see how someone's interests might change as they age, for example. 

But I think the interest level is really interesting to me. I think that's a really good way of doing it. It's if you're familiar with the term science capital or STEM capital, that's an idea that we think about a lot in the world of science communication and STEM communication is how much someone finds It feels like Science or STEM is for them, and I think interest level is an interesting way of condensing down.

You're looking at one specific aspect of that, of is this interesting to me in any way? So I think that's a really good way of doing it, to be honest. I think that really fascinates me about audience segmentation and thinking about audiences, is there's this spectrum, right?

Because in an ideal world, what you would do is understand every single person individually and look at that person as the fully realized, complex, nuanced human being that they are, and understand exactly what they want out of your piece of maths communication and what they might get out of it. 

At the other end of the spectrum, you assume that everyone is the same, you say my activity is for the general public, and everyone is gonna get, come to it with the same ideas and get the same things out of it, and that's also not ideal. And you can sit anywhere on the spectrum between these two things, and the reason why we have these models is so that we can make some assumptions, hopefully well evidenced assumptions but we can also understand that there's nuance and complexity in the people that are may or may not be interested in what we're doing.

Yes, I think it's a really, it's a really good place, I was gonna say a really good place to start.  That's not what I mean. I think it's, it is a really good but simple way of thinking about audiences. 

That's good. I think we were trying to put together that intuitively we have this idea that a class, a year nine class, as Katie said, on a Friday afternoon in a school where you've been brought in to talk to them are going to be a different level of engagement to  some kids in that age group who've come along to your thing at the library at the weekend or whatever it is.

They're just going to be different out there and you're going to make the event, you're going to make the activity that you're doing different accordingly, but I'm trying to represent that in a way that. people could take their case studies according to  where they felt they were on that was really useful.

I think having a model like this also helps to take the value judgment away. So we're not saying that it's good to be particularly interested or excited or passionate or knowledgeable about maths and bad to be uninterested. It's just looking at it in a really neutral way and saying, okay, who do I want to reach, who might I reach, whether or not I'm actively targeted at them, and as you say that's where that kind of marketing comes in and who might just rock up anyway so yeah, I think it's a, I think it's a really useful way of looking at it.

Yeah - it's often the risk that you make assumptions about your audience and actually acknowledging that, potentially people are there for different reasons and they might be coming to it from a different place, and I think a lot of people. think that they're talking to the general public.

As you say, it's my one bugbear is when people say, "Oh, it's for the general public". I'm like, "Yeah, which ones?" Because that's not a thing. That they make this assumption that they are reaching everyone. And actually, there are people who just wouldn't even come to the thing. There's people who wouldn't even pick up a book and read it. And the actual audience that you're reaching is often very different to what you're picturing it to be. And I think having an understanding of that really informs the way that you design stuff and the way that you talk about stuff. And obviously a lot of it will be adaptive, so if you're stood in front of a room full of people, you can very quickly tell whether or not you're pitching it wrong by the look on their faces.

And you can always adapt and ask more questions or, do things in a slightly different way on the fly. But in general, in terms of the planning and the decisions about what content to use and what, how to frame everything it's a really useful thing to do.

And I think with the case studies we didn't necessarily give people this model as pick yourself on this grid. But we got them to describe the audience and then we made a kind of call as to which categories it fit into. And a lot of them were multiple ages, multiple categories, potentially multiple interest levels as well.

But it is also interesting, it's definitely a planning tool, because like you say, I can be in front of a class of  kids and I know I've got two worksheets in my pocket and depending on how they behave, how they engage with it, I'm going to do one or the other and that's absolutely fine. But as a planning thing, you sometimes hear people say, Oh yeah, we're hoping to reach people who are not interested in maths at all and we're really going to convince them.

And how we're going to do that is a podcast and you go, who's going to download your podcast? Who's going to find that? And why are they going to click the download? You're just not going to reach those. So it's like a good tool to think about how am I going to reach the audience that I want to reach? 

I think another really useful way of thinking about this, and actually, I was thinking about this because I was listening to the most recent episode of this podcast that came out. And Grant and Ben were talking about Grant's math exposition competition, and they were talking about starting a video by giving people a reason to care rather than assuming that the person watching this video is already a maths nerd who's already fascinated by whatever puzzle you're going to be talking about. And I think thinking about audiences helps you work out why someone might care about what you're doing.  And that's, I think, a really helpful way of thinking about it for me. 

Yeah, none of this is easy, right? All of this is it's a constant battle to iterate and make things better. But yeah, I think this definitely gives you a sort of starting point to, to think about stuff from. 

Another interesting, just to give people another way of thinking about audiences, it something that might be interesting is that in the cultural sector so museums, art galleries, dance, music With those kinds of events, we use a pretty standardized kind of culture segments model.

You can look it up. It's culture segments by MHM. They're an audience inside consultancy who put this model together. And that looks at people's - their values, motivations, interests. It's really interesting because it's only like a seven, seven to ten, I think, question survey. You can do it if you go to the culture segments bit of the website on the MHM website.

And it basically puts you into one of 12 categories off the top of my head and it's things like, Entertainment is one segment, so that's people who are primarily interested in fun, so they're looking for things that are mainstream, that are really popular, that have a proven track record, versus another segment is I think it's called Enrichment, which is people who are looking for that kind of nostalgia, they're interested in heritage and tradition, or there might be the reason it's taking me I'm struggling a bit to remember the names is we use a slightly adapted version of the Science Museum groups, but so another segment that we use at SMG is called Time Poor Aspirers.

So these are people that really want to do fun, interesting, creative, cultural things, but they feel like they're really under time pressure. So they're definitely not going to do something unless they know that it's going to be really good.  All that to say is that I think another useful way of thinking about audience is how do I want to present this?

So do I want to present the thing that I'm doing as something that's really familiar and really fun and it's similar to something else that they might have heard of, for example? Or do I want to present this as a really weird, novel, new, exciting thing? And you're going to reach slightly different people with that. 

And again, it's a more complicated way of thinking about it than just age or how interested someone is in math. But there's just so much, so many layers to it, and there's so much kind of complexity and nuance, but there are simple tools that do exist out there that you can use to try and understand the people that are coming to, or that are engaged with your maths communication a little bit better.

Yeah, and I guess one way to think about it is if you were someone coming to this event, how did you find out about it? Like where, what, to, to, through what route have people come to this thing? And that might give you an insight into who they are or What their kind of perception of things might be.

Yeah, that's, it's really fascinating. And I imagine we could talk about this all day, but in the interest of keeping things short we will put a link to all of the things that we've mentioned, so the case studies that me and Peter did some other. useful audience related things and the model that you just mentioned there as well, and if you want to see any of the links from episodes of this podcast, you can find them on the website at talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast. And thanks very much to Peter and Hannah. 

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And finally, I chatted with the CEO of a maths education charity about the work RedSTART does across the UK. So I'm chatting to Sarah Marks, who is going to tell us a bit about a project that she's been working with. So Sarah, first of all, tell us about yourself. Who are you?  

So my name is Sarah Marks and I'm the CEO at RedSTART. 

RedSTART is a financial education charity that works with primary schools only and only schools that are serving communities of greater disadvantage. And we are aiming to move the dial in those schools on three areas financial literacy, Maths attainment and social mobility.  And we are also we've commissioned the Policy Institute at King's College in London to carry out a randomized control trial with our children in order to prove to the government the value of an intervention like this in schools, like the ones that we're working in.

That sounds absolutely fantastic. So what does that kind of look like practically? If you go into a school what sort of thing do you do?  

So we work with children from reception to year six, right the way through. What's different about the program that we run is that this intervention, in order to take part in it, not only do the schools have to be eligible in terms of the communities they serve, But also they have to sign up to become a member, which means they are agreeing to run this program on a long term basis.

Because the whole point of this intervention is that it's very much based around little and often. So we go into the schools and see the children every year, so we will see the same children from Reception right the way through to Year 6. Most of the time we are seeing them from Year 2 to Year 6. We see them twice a year.

There is a mixture of school based activities that are delivered by the teachers and workshops that we set up and run which are carousel based.  where the children, it's gamified. So the children are learning and moving around the room in groups of two or three, playing games and learning about how money works in society as they go.

And it finishes in year six with a workshop where we take the children out of school for the very last one. to a place of business that could be an office or any other sort of business premises. And we link there all the work we've done with them talking about skills in the workplace and this whole strange world that goes on outside of school to show them in a typical building.

All the sorts of jobs that might exist in that building that gets that building up and running. So everything from people in the loading bay, reception lawyers, accountants, fund managers, there could be all sorts of people in there. We try and, We try and spend some time with a range of different people.

And also we do the final workshop, which is about risk management and recognizing scams and investing and how to use your money wisely. 

That sounds incredible. Like what kind of response do you get from the kids about this? Is it something they enjoy or? 

Yeah, they really do enjoy it. Do you know, one of the most heartwarming things, which honestly wasn't something that we had particularly specifically designed the program around when we started, is the accessibility side of this.

Because we have in, particularly in the schools we work in, we have a very high number of children that are statemented with special educational needs and other challenges. And they often spend a lot of their day away from the rest of their peer group, working on their own. And one of the lovely things about this has been that we've had teachers saying to us that the way that those children have been able to get involved in these workshops with their peers, which is something they don't often get to do, because they can't.

often learn by sitting down and doing worksheets, but they can get involved when it's about moving around the room playing games. So that's been great. And generally speaking the children really engage very well. So again, even children that the teachers have been a little bit reticent about us going in to meet because their behavior can be a bit more challenging.

They too. Will a they want to learn about money. They know how important money is. They know that the atmosphere at home changes depending whether there's money or there isn't money. They understand just at that really core level that knowing How to manage money, and how to obtain money  is going to be really helpful to them when they get older, they know that.

So they're naturally really interested in what we're going to teach them. And the way in which we do it, with the gamified structure,  Engages all of the children, regardless, I would say, of their capabilities. We've very few children that have had to be, have not been able to participate. And we're at the end of the second year, academic year now.

We'll be going into the third academic year when we go back. But what's also been really pleasing is how much the children remember from the first year. The sessions that we've already done in the group that are receiving the intervention as compared obviously with the group that are not at the moment and the control group are not told to do nothing at all.

The schools there are told to do whatever they would normally do. If we didn't exist and in some cases, that's nothing and in other cases, they do some work with them around financial literacy but the point is that we're trying to compare this level of intervention and see how far we can move the dial with with other more ad hoc interventions, yeah, 

I guess it's about having that sort of consistency and, building something which it sounds like is definitely happening if they're remembering, that's always the challenge is getting them to remember things you've talked about previously. Yeah, I've found that sort of thing.

Often the case, like if you've got kids who don't necessarily engage with maths normally that either if they've got something that motivates them to do that and also something that's not quite what they normally think of as a maths lesson they can almost outshine the other pupils and then get that sort of confidence and feel like this is something they can engage with as well, which is wonderful.

Yeah, and we've also got a money management app that we've developed that sits on the IT system in the school. So it's only used in school. They use it for 15 minutes a week. And the way it works is that there are a bunch of quizzes in the app that the children take. And those quizzes are based around applied maths and money.

Basically questions, things we've taught them. And they earn RedSTART Pounds for every quiz that they take. And that money goes into their current account on the app. And there's also an interest bearing account. But they have to physically move their money into that account in order to pay.  And then in the playground we've set up a shop, which is just a shed effectively that, that has a red star shop sign.

And there they can buy physical items with their money so they can save up. And there are small ticket items that they can buy quite quickly. So there are, those would be things like bottles of bubbles stationary items. Glittery bouncy balls that kind of thing but there are also on within the app it shows the items that they can save up for that are available later on if they save and that would be things like lego sets and barbie dolls sports kits cinema tickets things like that so we're actually hoping to get them to experience the temptation of spending early but the benefit of holding on and waiting until you get something you really want.

And that is also a really exciting area. in terms of our development because the other thing we want to do next year is start to create jobs for the year six children in the shop. So there will be on the app a job description which will be about your skill sets and then the children will apply for those jobs.

They'll write a CV and apply for the jobs, they'll have an interview, they'll all be given a shift for which they'll be paid in RedSTART pounds. And there are two jobs. One is a shopkeeper job. So there you will have to check whether they've got enough money for the items they want to buy, take the money off when they, when the child takes their item.

And then there's the warehouse keeper, warehouse person, which is checking off all the deliveries that  making sure that what's been ordered has been received, putting things away nicely, labelling them up. So again, starting to think about what kind of person are you? Are you the analytical, quiet, person that wants to be more in the background thinking about what, working more on your own and being very detail oriented or are you the kind of front of house, hi everybody, come on in, the shop's open now and, all that kind of thing.

And showing them that there's jobs for every type of person, effectively. Whatever you are, there will be a job that will work for you. And  that maths is part of both of those jobs, but in a different way.  

Yeah, and I guess that sort of, it feels like it's a lot more holistic than just talking about maths, and it ties it into the wider world of work, and how does working in an office, what's that and that kind of thing.

Which. I guess sometimes when you learn maths at school, it's very much out of context. It's just yeah, what are these numbers and what do I do with them? Yeah. But this is really genuinely applied in that sense, yeah.  

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And what, in one of the workshops, we do a session with them, which I always find really interesting, where we ask them to pretend that they're the government and they're given areas, obviously, that they can allocate money to. 

They have this discussion in their little working groups about what they would put the money into and why and it really gets them thinking about  the decisions that have to be made and what happens with their taxes where that money comes from and then what the government have to do with it and the choices that have to be made.

And it's amazing how much they are capable of thinking about at a really early age to be honest.  

Yeah, I'm imagining working with primary school children on this kind of thing, and it's, it feels like a lot of very big ideas, but actually, yeah, a lot of them, when you boil it down to it, it's quite simple.

It's, do I spend this money now, or do I save it up for something bigger? That's the sort of classic child psychology, isn't it? The marshmallow test, or whatever. But as an adult, that's the kind of decision that you face all the time, and I guess in, in government and in policy, they're trying to weigh up pros and cons of all these decisions, but, It's, yeah, that's absolutely fantastic.

So what's the kind of scale of this? So you what kind of area do you cover with this?  

So we've got we've got hubs at the moment in Cardiff which covers Cardiff and South Wales. We've got one in Bristol which is Bristol Bath, Weston super Mare, that area. We've got inside of the M25 in London.

Basically then we have some a hub down in Sussex which is covers from Crawley down to Brighton area. We have Suffolk around Lowestoft  and then we have the northeast which is Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham. And then we also have Edinburgh, Fife and the borders. Those are where our hubs are at the moment.

And we have last year, we had 57, member schools. This year, I think we'll be, we've been receiving applications from schools that want to join in those areas that I've mentioned that are eligible. And we're just going through that now to see how many places we can offer. But I think we could be up to something around 80 schools when we go back in the autumn term. 

Excellent. And I guess you have staff that are trained to go out and deliver the sessions in all these places.  

Yeah, so some of our team are ex primary teachers themselves. So we have an ex head, an ex deputy, and an ex primary teacher who work on developing the resources because the other thing is that every year we're trying to push the children a little bit more because our hope is obviously that where we started with say a year four class will not be stretching enough for that year four class in a couple of years time because by then the children that arrive in year four will have had three or four years of education before they hit that spot which should mean they're capable of doing things that perhaps we would have done with year five in the past so we're constantly reviewing what we're doing we get feedback from the teachers and and from obviously observing the children and from our own team every year about how things are going and ideas about what we can do further to enhance it.

And then we we bring volunteers in with us for the workshops who are business people that we involve in training before they come in but we or the teacher lead the workshop. They're just helping to run the station within the carousel learning environment. So the leading of the pieces is always either a teacher or a RedSTART lead of some sort.

If people wanted to find out more about this project or read up about it, what, where would they go for that? 

So we have a website, that is redstarteducate.org - you can go and look there. You can also contact one of us on that general email address. And obviously you can come to me personally. I'm sarah.marks@redstareducate.org. And keep an eye, look out for us on LinkedIn. Link with us there. We post a lot about what we're doing there. We do also have a Twitter page. I know that a lot of schools in particular are more often on that medium than they are on the LinkedIn platform. So any of those areas, you'll find us. 

Excellent. And we'll pop all of those links into the show notes for the podcast as well. Thank you very much, Sarah. It's been wonderful to chat to you. Thanks. 

That's all for this episode of the Talking Maths in Public podcast. Head to talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast for more episodes, to suggest your ideas for future segments and to find out more about the TMiP network. Until then! 

Brady: Hi there, this is Brady from Numberphile, and you've been listening to the Talking Maths in Public podcast, presented and edited by Katie Steckles, and funded by the International Centre for the Mathematical Sciences. The music is For Her by Lidérc on Pixabay.