Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material / Juergen Maasz and John O’Donoghue -- Modelling in Probability and Statistics / Manfred Borovcnik and Ramesh Kapadia -- Problems for the Secondary Mathematics Classrooms on the Topic of Future Energy Issues / Astrid Brinkmann and Klaus Brinkmann -- Coding Theory / Tim Brophy -- Travelling to Mars: A Very Long Journey / Jean Charpin -- Modelling the Storage Capacity of 2D Pixel Mosaics / Simone Göttlich and Thorsten Sickenberger -- Mathematics for Problems in the Everyday World / Günter Graumann -- Political Polls and Surveys / Ailish Hannigan -- Correlations between Reality and Modelling / Herbert Henning and Benjamin John -- Exploring the Final Frontier / Patrick Johnson -- What are the Odds? / Patrick Johnson and John O’Donoghue -- Models for Logistic Growth Processes (e.g. Fish Population in a Pond, Number of Mobile Phones within a Given Population) / Astrid Kubicek -- Teaching Aspects of School Geometry Using the Popular Games Rugby and Snooker / Jim Leahy -- Increasing Turnover? Streamlining Working Conditions? A Possible Way to Optimize Production Processes as a Topic in Mathematics Lessons / Juergen Maasz -- Mathematics and Eggs / Juergen Maasz and Hans-Stefan Siller -- Digital Images / Thomas Schiller -- Modelling and Technology / Hans-Stefan Siller -- List of Contributors / Juergen Maasz and John O’Donoghue.

This is a book full of ideas for introducing real world problems into mathematics classrooms and assisting teachers and students to benefit from the experience. Taken as a whole these contributions provide a rich resource for mathematics teachers and their students that is readily available in a single volume. Nowadays there is a universal emphasis on teaching for understanding, motivating students to learn mathematics and using real world problems to improve the mathematics experience of school students. However, using real world problems in mathematics classrooms places extra demands on teachers in terms of extra-mathematical knowledge e. g. knowledge of the area of applications, and pedagogical knowledge. Care must also be taken to avoid overly complex situations and applications. Papers in this collection offer a practical perspective on these issues, and more. While many papers offer specific well worked out lesson type ideas, others concentrate on the teacher knowledge needed to introduce real world applications of mathematics into the classroom. We are confident that mathematics teachers who read the book will find a myriad of ways to introduce the material into their classrooms whether in ways suggested by the contributing authors or in their own ways, perhaps through mini-projects or extended projects or practical sessions or enquiry based learning. We are happy if they do!