A daredevil teacher leaps from planes, climbs mountains and swims with sharks to create the world’s most extreme – MATHS LESSONS.
Rob Bradley visited the Pyramids of Egypt to talk trigonometry and stood astride an erupting VOLCANO to illustrate how graphs can chart the lava flow.
The brave boffin, 35, posts his videos online and takes them into lessons to make the traditionally stuffy subject fun for shocked kids.
He takes photos of his extreme stunts then puts mathematical equations over the pictures to show the science behind them.
The hair-raising footage includes Rob in scuba gear swimming towards a dangerous bull shark in Fiji – to calculate the area of its FIN.
The fully qualified teacher also shows pupils how to rearranges equations from the steep slopes of MOUNT EVEREST.
And in yet another heart-stopping feat Rob dons a wingsuit and soars through the air at 150mph to demonstrate how to calculate velocity.
The maths whizz turned adventurer taught at comprehensive and grammar schools in his hometown of Plymouth, Devon, before deciding to take his classes to the ‘next level’.
He decided to tour the world and film his adventures for his website where kids can log on and watch tutorials and download worksheets.
Rob also teaches three days a week where he now lives in Cheshunt, Herts, and shows them to amazed pupils.
He said: “I have spent the past two years travelling the world, jumping from planes in a special wing suit, swimming with sharks and humpback whales, climbing an erupting volcano and much more.
“I have turned these adventures into inspirational, engaging and exciting online maths tutorials.
“There is no teacher in the world that has gone to the lengths that I have gone to, to make maths exciting and relevant to real life.
“The first maths lesson I made were skydiving ones. I used them in schools to teach youngsters about speed, distance and time.
“I would actually plot graphs of my skydives then use them to make calculations. Once the kids are engaged they are more inclined to do the other things that aren’t so much fun.
“One of the things they do in maths papers is they draw a three dimensional pyramid and they get you to work out angles, lengths or heights.
“In lessons I make a 3D pyramid with straws so they can visualise the problem. So I thought what better way to do this than to use the great Pyramids of Egypt as a backdrop with the Sphinx?”
Rob says his scariest moment to date was a lesson on quadratic graphs on the slopes of an erupting volcano on remote Vanuatu Island in the south Pacific.
He said: “It was spewing out lava and we knew one rogue eruption could seriously harm us. Swimming with bull sharks was also quite scary. One of them went for one of the instructors.
“People might think it’s crazy but if you calculate the probability of being killed it’s just as easy to die on the way to school in the morning.”
Despite spending 12 years as a teacher Rob has also managed to win a gold medal for skysurfing in the British National Skydiving Championships.
He’s also filmed a 15-minute documentary about Mount Everest which has over 500,000 views on YouTube.
Rob said: “I am on a mission to inspire young people to do well in maths, to achieve their full potential and to go out there and live life to the full.
“Kids come into school and tell me they’ve been watching my YouTube videos the night before.
“When they’re in a maths exam, that’s what they’re going to remember – it engages them. And it’s nice to show people that maths teachers aren’t really boring at all.”
To visit Rob’s website log on to www.bigbrainmaths.com
