How to Play Before I introduce the problem, I pass out some Post-its. One pad of Post-its is enough for a group of students to try the problem several times. Attempt 1: I first ask students to fold the Post-it once in any way they want. Then, I ask them to count how many sides … Continue reading 29. Two Fold

How to Play When I introduce this problem to students, I don’t initially display the poster. Instead, I recreate the poster on a whiteboard using a 4 digit number supplied by one of my students. I start by asking a student for a 4 digit number.I sort their number from high to low and from … Continue reading 28. High Minus Low

How to Play Before I use this problem with students, I prepare lots of Sphinx tiles. If my students are working individually or in pairs, I print and cut copies of Size A from the handout. If my students are working in groups of 3 or more, I print and cut copies of Size B. … Continue reading 27. Sphinx

It’s been a while since we posted a new problem on Play With Your Math. But we’ve been playing! And we have several problems that we are excited to share. For (at least) the rest of the year, we plan to post a new problem at the start of each month. After you’ve had some … Continue reading Let’s Play!

This year, I'm going to be teaching one section of Intro to Programming. This will be my first time teaching any computer science, and it is definitely a bit outside my comfort zone. Fortunately, a colleague pointed me towards Carnegie Mellon's CS Academy curriculum. I appreciate that the course translates well to remote learning, and … Continue reading Playing with CS Academy

Play With Your Math problems are designed to have low floors and high ceilings, but  designing a task which has a high ceiling can be really complicated. Take, for instance, 18. X-Factor: Of all the possible numbers I could have chosen for this problem, why did I choose 12? Here are three reasons. To make … Continue reading Ceilings

I meant to blog about this problem about 10 months ago, but better late than never. Highlight: We got student-supplied answers for 1-100. Lowlight: Those 100 answers did not come from 100 different students. In fact, one student was able to come up with about a third of them himself. We got some but not nearly … Continue reading 9. Four Fours

Source: NRICH Maths – Elevenses Why did we choose this problem? Good Play With Your Math problems: involve some sort of “play” before choosing a specific strategy. have a low floor (accessibility and entry point) have a high ceiling (need for more complex mathematics) have a succinct, accessible, intuitive wording and visualization This problem meets … Continue reading 13. Thirteens

On Friday, we shared Play 12. Space Race with our students. Here is a sketch of how this problem developed. 1. Find a fun problem. We met Ben over the summer at a BU discussion workshop, showed him some of our Play problems, and talked about our approach to the project. Later, Ben sent us a problem that … Continue reading 12. Space Race