On Tuesday 7 June Professor David Bryant from the University of Otago gave an interactive talk about mathematical modelling to 15 interested students.

With David's assistance, students tackled problems such as, How thick is cling film? How long is the spaghetti in a tin of spaghetti? and the age old problem of How long is a piece of string (in the world's largest ball of string)? Instead of using complicated mathematics, students were encouraged to use the simplest mathematics possible to find a reasonable approximation of the answer to these questions. And so armed with a raspberry spring roll, a tin of spaghetti tipped out on a plate, and formulae for the area of a circle, the area of a rectangle, the volume of a cylinder, and the volume of a sphere, students successfully solved these problems in under an hour!