About

My name is Dan Stucke. I am a Maths teacher based in Manchester, England. I teach in an inner-city 11-16 Comprehensive School and have done since 2003. I grew up in the Lake District, before moving to Manchester to study Aerospace Engineering at Manchester University.

This blog spawned out of my work in helping to set up a Maths department blog at my previous school and from reading a number of other excellent blogs on education. In December 2009 this blog was moved from Edublogs to it’s new home at mrstucke.com.

I’ve started this blog primarily to talk about my experiences of using blogs and other parts of ‘Web2.0′ to engage pupils in my classroom; and secondly to engage myself with the growing community of educators on the web.

My current labour of love is our online Scheme of Work for KS3 which can be found in all it’s wiki glory at: http://followmemaths.wikispaces.com.

I am mrstucke on Twitter, please feel free to add me and join in the conversation.

mrstucke
Twitter: mrstucke

26 Jan, 2007

Thanks for the kind words, and the inspiration from your own writings amongst others to start this blog!

Speaking of which, could you tell me how you got your little del.icio.us tag cloud onto your edublog sidebar? Despite my best efforts of fiddling with the sidebar widget I have failed to get anything more than you can see at present!

Thanks,

Dan

Reply
kwhobbes
26 Jan, 2007

Hello Dan,
Look forward to your contributions to the discussions. I visited you math blog – great setup. I’m going to pass this on to our division as something to look at.
btw, I was to the Lake District three years ago on a 19 day trip through England. Relatives toured us around. What an absolutely beautiful area. Would love to go back soon!

Kelly

Reply
tbarrett
28 Jan, 2007

Hi Dan
great to have you with us! I look forward to reading your thoughts on your blog, please let me know if there is anything I can help with.

Best wishes

Tom

PS : I trained to be a teacher at Charlotte Mason – so know the Lakes very well – 4 great years there!

Reply
mrstucke
Twitter: mrstucke

28 Jan, 2007

Thanks Tom,

That’s taken me back, I remember the PGCE students from Charlotte Mason coming into my school when I was a kid!

Dan

Reply
Stan H
23 Jul, 2008

Tried to comment directly on your blog, but couldn’t. I am interested in your game design lesson (on Twitter). How did it go?

I spent a day off timetable running a game design workshop for Year 7’s & 8’s. By the way, my lesson plan went out the window after 5 minutes. They absolutely loved it and went way beyond my expectations!

Very few games got completed (to complete a game would be to stop them imagining how to improve it!

All the games are at:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/MrHallMoorside/

My favourite:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/MrHallMoorside/221105

ICT are now planning to take this to the next level and included in the KS3 curriculum.

Reply
mrstucke
Twitter: mrstucke

28 Aug, 2008

Hi Stan, apologies for such a long delay in replying – I’ve been ‘off network’ for most of the summer!

The day went OK, although only having just under an hour with each group limited what we could achieve. I curtailed the creativity a little by getting everyone to make a maze game and showing them how to draw the maze, add a character and map directional control keys to that character. I then left them some hints as to where to take their games to next.

Didn’t get round to uploading their games, I’ll try and do it when back in school.

Instructions I used are here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5236778/Scratch-Maze-Game

Reply
Gareth Jones
3 Aug, 2009

Hi Dan
I have read a number of your posts with considerable interest this afternoon. I’m a multimedia developer based in Manchester and I’m currently looking at developing educational software for teaching maths to kids at Key Stage 3 level.
As you’ll see from my website, I was the original developer on three of the Bowland Trust’s maths resources (Outbreak, Product Wars and Explorers) two years ago and I’m currently looking at putting together a second phase of such resources. I have a number of ideas spread over a number of different areas, and I would love to discuss with you your thoughts on such software and how it could be made more useful for you and your colleagues.
If you’re interested in such a discussion, I’ll look forward to hearing from you.
Regards
Gareth

Reply
- MrStucke
  Twitter: mrstucke
  
  4 Aug, 2009
  
  Hi Gareth, I’d be delighted to discuss any ideas you have further. Feel free to Twitter/EMail me about anything.
  
  Cheers,
  
  Dan