Some Prime Examples
Recently a group of Year 12 students delivered a lesson about prime numbers to members of the Year 9 Athenaeum. The Sixth Formers had prepared this lesson as part of their Enrichment Programme covering Number Theory in a taster of university-level Maths.
Using the PowerPoints they had designed, the students carefully unpacked the mysteries of prime numbers, ways of checking if a number is prime and how prime numbers are linked to encryption.
This lesson connected with work done earlier this year about Quantum Computing and this was a theme picked up in the Q&A session at the end of the presentation.
The Year 9 students asked some interesting questions regarding encryption methods, modular arithmetic, and the work of the famous mathematician Fermat, and I am sure this will have prepared them well for the further work on encryption they will do later in the Scholarship Programme.
