Real-world applications of maths to help motivate students

Hey everyone!

I’d like to share with you some real-world applications of maths that I found to really capture the imagination of high school students.

1. Functions in artificial intelligence 🤖 – this field would not exist without functions. Functions play a pivotal role in allowing machine learning models to achieve a certain task. Be it, ChatGTP, identifying dogs in a photo, or self-driving cars, all these applications heavily rely on the optimisation of functions.
2. Trigonometry in video games 🎮 – behind the beautiful graphics are millions of triangles all being processed at hundreds of times a second. Without trigonometry, you wouldn’t be able move or turn your character, determine a spaceship’s velocity, or render graphics!
3. Probability in weather forecasting 🌦️ – together with matrices, you can quite accurately predict tomorrow’s weather. This is (partly) how it’s done by all weather bureaus around the world!

I'd be curious to know if you've tried incorporating something like this into your classrooms or perhaps any other strategies that you've found to spark excitement in maths class.