Can I copy/print/share Bowland Maths materials?

Bowland Maths materials are copyright © 2008-2014 Bowland Charitable Trust. However, they may be freely used for non-commercial education purposes. You may print, copy and adapt them for use in your school, place them on your school VLE/intranet or install them on your school computers and file servers.

For any other use, please contact us for confirmation.

Can I use Bowland Maths outside of the UK?

Yes. Bowland Maths may be freely used for non-commercial education purposes anywhere in the world. In the past, access was limited to the UK – this restriction has been removed.

Is Bowland Maths available on CD/DVD?

The primary method of distribution for Bowland Maths is this website. We are no longer distributing DVDs. We hope that the improvements to the website will make it easier to access and download materials.

A large number of DVDs of the first phase of Bowland were distributed to UK schools from 2008 with funding from the DfE – its worth checking your stock cupboard! However, these do not include the new materials added since 2008.

Does Bowland Maths work on tablets?

Unfortunately, all of the technical decisions behind Bowland Maths were made before the appearance of the iPad in 2010. Consequently, many of the computer-based Case Studies require Flash, which is unlikely to ever be supported on tablets (it was briefly supported on Android, but that has now been dropped).

However, not all of the Case Studies require Flash, and even when they do they contain many resources that could potentially be used on tablets. So, you could download the case study to a PC and make PDF worksheets etc. available to tablet users. Also, as part of the website redesign, you no longer need Flash just to get past the front page, and can now, as a minimum, see the complete teacher/lesson guides for each Case Study, as well as view all the assessment tasks. In the future, we will be looking at adding more direct links to the individual resources in the Case Studies with a view to making them usable on table.

Finally, the 'player' for the video-based PD modules has been completely re-written to run without Flash and should work with iPads, although that feature should be regarded as experimental. Some of the classroom activities in the PD still require Flash, though.

Do Bowland Maths Case Studies work on Macs?

Where have all the Mac downlaods gone?

The majority of the Case Studies are still Mac compatible - for more details see the information pages for individual Case Studies.

All of our downloads are now in ".zip" format, which can be unpacked on both PC and Mac. (On Mac, just double-click on the .zip file to turn it into a regular folder - your browser might do this automatically).

A number of the Case Studies originally included Mac-specific versions of software. Sadly, most of these no longer work in recent versions of Mac OS although, in most cases, the case study can still be run in a web browser on a Mac. We have therefore removed the Mac '.dmg' downloads. The only casualty of this seems to be Crash Test.

I downloaded a .zip to my PC & opened it, but the software won't run.

If you 'open' a .zip file in Windows, it lets you browse the contents as if it were a regular folder but software and web pages inside won't open properly. You need to extract the files to a regular folder. If you have already opened the .zip file, look for an 'Extract all' button near the top of the folder window. If you have saved the .zip file to disk, locate the .zip file, right-click ob it and choose 'Extract all'.

I'm having problems downloading/opening/running Case Studies

Institutional security policies, 'secure' internet gateways, virus/malware scanners on your PC, constantly changing features in web browsers can all make things difficult. Windows does not even make downloading and unpacking a .zip as easy as it might be. You will probably need to find some local technical support.

Our first suggestion is to use the online version, if one is available. The second thing to try is to download on a home PC/home internet connection (you can always transfer the contents to a memory stick).

Feel free to contact us if you're having a problem - we may well have a bug at our end - but we can't promise solutions to every problem.

I'm having problems with the PD modules

The PD modules have been completely re-written to avoid using Flash. We have 'gone live' with the new version because most people who tried it preferred it to the old version - which didn't work for everybody anyway.

We have seen some problems with institutional virus scanners messing up the video so it didn't start, took ages to load or couldn't jump back/forward. However, it is now possible to download each module (the files are quite large so you'll need a reasonable connection) and run it from hard disk.