Topcon Helps DEC! Develop Math Skills Training for Survey Sites

Topcon GB & Ireland has supported the launch of a new teaching guide for Class Of Your Own’s (COYO) Design Engineer Construct! (DEC!) learning programme. The guide has been designed to help show students the importance of math outside of the classroom.

The ‘DEC! Maths Explained’ guide was created by qualified DEC! teachers from Drummond High School in Edinburgh, Michael Steele and Mark Holden. It provides ideas and suggested lesson plans helping to put math into the context of design, engineering, surveying and construction tasks. In doing so, the aim is to give real purpose to students, and to demonstrate that built environment professionals use the same classroom principles in their jobs.

Including topics on spatial awareness, measurement, size, ratio and scale, the examples cover the different aspects of math in many construction professions and subsequently encourage students to consider such careers.

Topcon has been working closely with DEC! for over five years to support the programme in a number of different ways, including providing equipment and training days for teachers and schools. Earlier this year, the positioning partner donated ten comprehensive surveying kits containing total stations, tripods, prisms, measurement staffs and tapes. The schools were also trained on, and given access to, their most recent version of its MAGNET suite software.

Dave Bennett, business manager at Topcon GB & Ireland, said: “Students often ask when they’ll use math principles in everyday life as they struggle to understand the relevance in the real world. By putting math into context of applications they’ll recognise, we hope to bring the subject to life in the classroom and subsequently spark an interest in construction careers after they leave school.”

Alison Watson, founder and chief executive of Class Of Your Own, said: “We want to make the teaching syllabus as easy and useful to our teachers as possible. Through this guide we hope that we are doing just that, while also providing context to help explain math in the world of work. It offers a way to making math purposeful and accessible to a wide range of students.”