Strand 3 Junior Certificate Higher Level Numbers and Shapes

Manipulating and working with a wide variety of numbers is a daily occurrence that everyone can relate to. Whether you are cooking, telling the time or shopping numbers will play an important role. Numbers and Shapes is one of the strands of the new Project Maths syllabus in the Irish curriculum. The concepts of numbers and number patterns are the basic building blocks of arithmetic and algebra.

Furthermore, we cannot escape the use of numbers in our everyday lives: we use clocks and watches to count through the hours and minutes of our day; we count out money to pay our bills. Then, the application of arithmetic and geometric series in finance is investigated through loan repayments and investments. The use of  APR (annual percentage rate) and AER (annual equivalent rate) when calculating repayments is investigated.

Students are also introduced to the concept of complex numbers and shown how to add, subtract, multiply and divide them. Complex numbers are used to represent the flow of current in a circuit and in most areas of electronics. We use numbers to measure the perimeter and area of various shapes (triangles, rectangles, hexagons and circles) and to work out the volumes of solids such as cylinders, cones, spheres and hemispheres.