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What is it?
Regular readers of the Resource of the Week feature will know I am a bit of a sucker for a fancy use of Excel, and once again I have been hooked in. The fact that Excel can be programmed – assuming you know how! – to make use of random numbers in calculations means that essentially you can generate an infinite number of questions. And this resource exploits that beautifully. Here we have 20 number-based questions covering a range of topics, including the four operations, fractions, rounding and powers, and hitting F9 produces a completely different set. And if that wasn’t enough, the answers are also there too!

How can it be used?
There are three ways I will be using this resource:
1. A whole class starter – simply project the set of 20 questions up, and set the students away. A diet of these questions once or twice a week keeps all those key numbers skills ticking over
2. Individual low-stakes quizzes – the author explains that he created this resource to prevent students copying off each other. Indeed, if you scroll down the Excel sheet you will see that there are in fact 32 sets of the 20 questions, all completely different. So, if you click “print” you get 32 personalised quizzes which can be given out to students. Alternatively, I have found that printing out 4 different quizzes, and ensuring every group of four students has a different quiz, works really well. Once students have completed their own quiz, they can then be encouraged to check each other’s work, comparing similar questions.
3. Independent study – emailing this Excel document home, or putting it on the school VLE means that students can benefit from this all important practice whenever they like.

Thanks so much for sharing
Craig Barton

Download: Infinite worksheet – Number Gym
View the author’s other resources