ABOUT MOTIVATE
	about our conferences
	conference charges
	about our courses
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CONFERENCE PROGRAMMES
	mathematics
	science
	cross-curricular
	conferences for specific schools

About Motivate

Motivate is a unique and exciting videoconferencing project!

It all began in May 1997, when a school in London wondered how they might make use of videoconferencing equipment which was lying in a cupboard just gathering dust. The first Motivate VC linked students from several London and Norfolk schools with two Cambridge mathematicians, Dr Ruth Williams and Dr Susan Pitts, in a conference on Geometry and Gravity and on Probability. Since those early days, many hundreds of schools and many thousands of students - the youngest just starting school, the oldest about to leave for university - from several different countries have participated in our conferences.

We now run around 30 day and month-long conferences and 5 long projects per year, linking schools with other schools in the UK and internationally and with professional mathematicians, scientists, teachers ... in fact anyone who has a good story with a mathematical or scientific basis! Many of our conferences also have a significant cross-curricular content.

Our objectives

To enrich the mathematical/scientific experience of school students, to broaden their mathematical/scientific horizons, to give them an experience of collaborative working on mathematical/scientific and cross-curricular tasks and of presenting reports of their work to an audience, to raise aspirations and to improve mathematical and scientific thinking and communication skills.
To provide an archive of extended projects on a variety of topics for students of all ages.
To help schools set up videoconferencing and to develop guidelines for technical and media presentation that will also serve other subjects across the curriculum and enable schools to develop videoconferencing links with other schools around the world.
To evaluate our conferences and to contribute to debate on relevant pedagogical issues.

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