This week 28 pupils from Lea Valley Primary School joined the darts action, by taking part in the Professional Darts Corporation’s (PDC) award-winning Bullseye Maths programme, alongside Countdown’s Rachel Riley and PDC referee Kirk Bevans.
The PDC’s award-winning Bullseye Maths scheme promotes numeracy, with sessions featuring numbers-based games and worksheet activity to engage primary school pupils with maths and darts. Alongside an online Bullseye Maths portal on the PDC website, popular in-school sessions have been developed and run by staff from Nottingham College’s Room 180 Academy to encourage maths learning through a combination of numeracy exercises and darts-based games.
Wednesday’s session at the Palace came during the sport’s biggest event as pupils got the chance to experience the environment of the famous World Darts Championship.
Rachel Riley: “What I love about National Numeracy and this kind of thing is it’s using maths in the real world. You use maths to solve real world problems, and this is helping their mathematical reasoning, and that will be beneficial for whether they’re kids or adults.”
Bullseye Maths co-ordinator Gary Horsley, who led the session, added: “It was wonderful to share the Bullseye Maths session with Rachel and she was very inspiring for us all. Rachel is an ideal role model for all young people and her ability with maths is just awe-inspiring! The children and staff were very lucky to meet Rachel and it was a lovely addition to our normal lesson delivery – we look forward to more Bullseye Maths fun in 2025 as the project continues to grow from strength to strength.”
PDC referee Kirk Bevins, who previously met Riley when he starred in the hit TV show Countdown, also joined in Wednesday’s session to encourage the pupils to engage with darts-based numeracy activities. Kirk says: “Darts is a sport which is all about numbers and Bullseye Maths is a great way to encourage anyone to apply the basics of the sport to numeracy. It was great to see the pupils involved in the session enjoying themselves and getting the chance to sample the unique Ally Pally experience!”
Bullseye Maths was launched in 2022 and received a Bronze Award at the 2023 Sports Business Awards.
For more information about Bullseye Maths, to play the interactive Mathlete game or to download worksheets, please visit www.pdc.tv/maths.
