The following resource has been kindly shared on the TES Maths website. It is available to purchase by registering. And to access all the lovely Resource of the Week (ROTW) resources, just click here

Every fourth Resource of the Week this year will highlight a top-quality Premium resource for sale on TES that has been created by a teacher.

What is it?
As my wife will tell you, getting me to part with £10 is not an easy task. So, it was with more than a little reluctance that I snapped up this resource. But, I can confirm that I am a very satisfied customer. This Test Maker is nothing short of excellent. I have written many times about how much in awe I am of some of the things that Excel can do, but this has to be one of the best ever. Not only can you use Excel’s random number function to generate an infinite number of questions, but you can also very easily customise the test, so you get the exact questions you want, in the exact order you want them. And then – just to add the icing to the topic of the cake – the answers are provided too.

How can it be used?
So far, I have used this resource in two different ways. I have used it to generate a weekly homework for my Year 7 class – and I was very happy with the formatting and the way the document looked upon printing. But more than this I have sued the resource in class, quickly building questions based on what we have done in the lesson, and then projecting it onto the interactive whiteboard. Students can work on the questions, and then a simple click makes the answers appear so they can mark their work themselves. This have proven particularly useful for my Year 11 class during revision time, when I need to keep their brains active across a whole range of topics.

Thanks for sharing!
Craig Barton

A word from the author
I am currently Head of Mathematics in an international school in Spain and this is something we use in our department for Years 7, 8 and 9 (and sometimes for GCSE core level revision). Originally I created the Question Bank with ‘static’ questions but 3 or 4 years ago I thought I would test my Excel skills over the summer and see if I could make all of the questions contain a random element which would allow them to be recalculated ensuring our assessments will not always have the same answers. With some questions this was quick and easy with others more complicated. The macros and functions were added in afterwards with the aim of making the resource more user friendly. All of my resources tend to get modified from time to time and I am always looking for feedback to try and make them better.

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