My first introduction to the Panda Squares Puzzle was from one of my favorite inspiration sources: Twitter! I saw a tweet by Jenny Leake that sparked my curiosity. This curiosity led me to do a google search. I was pleasantly surprised to find David Butler‘s blog at the top of the search results. From his …
Puzzles
Last week, I came across a fun perfect square puzzle. Place a set of numbers in a row such that adjacent pairs of numbers always sum to a perfect square. I decided to create a version of the perfect square puzzle for my students to try who finished their 9 weeks test early. To keep …
The Crazy Eight Paper Folding Puzzle may be made up of only a single sheet of paper, but it is actually eight different engaging and infuriating puzzles in one!
Today I’m excited to share the 9 Dots Puzzle with you. I love puzzles. I also love finding a way to incorporate them into class. Since the first week of school is rampant with schedule changes (especially this year since we don’t have a guidance counselor), I aim to engage my students in math-y activities …
Today I want to share one of my favorite puzzles that I used with my students last year. It involves one of my favorite things in the world, Post It Notes! I learned about this puzzle from Chris Smith‘s amazing maths newsletter. If you’re not signed up to receive his newsletters, you need to do …
The activity I’m about to share isn’t super fancy or complex, but my students absolutely loved it. I had planned two activities for our 50 minute class period in Algebra 1 on reviewing measures of central tendency: this activity and another. We did this activity first, and my students did not want to move on …
Back before spring break, I tried out two new-to-me logic puzzles with my students. I already blogged about the Slants puzzles from Brain Bashers. Today, I want to blog about the Tents puzzles from Brain Bashers. These Tents puzzles can be found here on the Brain Bashers website. I created a one-page introduction with the …
In February, Mary Bourassa wrote a blog post about Skyscraper Puzzles. As soon as I read the post, I knew I needed to use this puzzle in my classroom. I even sent my husband a link, gushing about how amazing these puzzles were! The puzzles from the brainbashers.com website weren’t quite the right size to …
I found these interesting looking slants puzzles from brainbashers.com. I created a one-page introduction with the rules for these puzzles to give to my students. In the last few days before Spring Break, a large portion of my students were gone for various reasons. I decided it was not an ideal time to start a …
Today I want to share with you this Square Pi Day Puzzle. Since this next week is spring break, my students and I celebrated an early Pi Day on Friday, March 10th. Most of the activities we did were my usual “go-to” pi day activities. We had a contest to see who could memorize the …
Last week, I ran across an activity by Frank Tapson called “How Far Can YOU Climb?” (page 34). The premise of the puzzle is quite simple. Form the longest chain possible by moving horizontally or vertically from one number to an increasing number. Here are Frank Tapson’s instructions: I printed off a class set, and …
These Angle Maze Puzzles from Naoki Inaba challenge students to find a path through a maze by being able to recognize common angle measurements. Draw a path through the maze from S to G. Each time you pass through a numbered circle, the path must form that angle in degrees. This summer, I blogged about …
Zukei puzzles are the brilliant creation of Naoki Inaba. Inaba has posted these puzzles for free on his website, but it can be a bit hard to navigate since everything is written in Japanese. You may have heard of Inaba from his popular area maze puzzles. Instructions for Solving Zukei Puzzles The instructions for the …
I’m excited to introduce you to the 5-4-3-2-1 Challenge. On Sunday morning, Nancy Swank tweeted me a link to a puzzle on NPR’s website. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because Nancy is the entire reason why NPR spent an entire day in my classroom in 2014. I followed the link and started reading …
I found this dragon puzzle to practice special right triangles online, and I fell in love with it. Each of the triangles is a special right triangle. I did a bit of research, and I was able to find the original source. I also found the same problem in McDougal Littell’s Geometry: An Integrated …
I remember being totally stumped the first time I saw this parking spot number brainteaser. It’s the type of puzzle that makes you groan as soon as you figure it out!
I love presenting my students with this interactive frog jumping puzzle that I found online here. Each frog can only jump the way it is facing. And, frogs can only jump over frogs of the opposite color. The goal of the puzzle is to make the frogs switch sides. I give different a students …
I was first introduced to the proof is in the pudding brainteaser in a book I was reading. I read the puzzle, puzzled over it for a few minutes, considered looking up the answer in the back of the book, and decided against it. A few weeks ago, Fawn mentioned that this puzzle was …
I found a scientific notation square puzzle activity (also known as a tarsia puzzle) online. I printed these out on different colors of paper and laminated them. The different colors of paper strategy is a trick I learned this summer at the OCTM conference. One of the speakers said that she prints activities …
Build It is a cooperative, team building activity that encourages students to work together, communicate, and think logically as they construct a geometric object to satisfy a set of given clues. If you’re looking to work on vocabulary, this activity introduces/reinforces words such as “face” and “edge.” I learned about Build It from Stanford’s website. The …
Recently, I posted about some awesome area and volume puzzles created by Naoki Inaba. You can read that post here. While researching those puzzles and looking for possible online sources for them, I found some on Mr. Inaba’s website. This led me to start wondering, “What kind of other puzzles has he created?” So, ever-curious …
Area Maze Puzzles from prolific Japanese puzzle creator Naoki Inaba have become quite popular in the United States. This hasn’t always been the case. I first learned about these puzzles from a tweet from Lisa Bejarano. At the time of her tweet, you could only really get your hands on a large number of area …
After making my Function (or Not) Puzzle to give students practice classifying relations as a function or not a function, I was eager to make a similar open middle style activity to practice a different skill. I settled on creating an evaluating functions activity that would give students practice evaluating functions and hopefully help them …
I created this function vs not a function puzzle to help my students practice determining if a relation is a function or not a function. I also wanted my activity to perform double duty. I wanted students to be able to use the exact same activity to form relations that were functions and that were …
I tried out some Masyu puzzles the other day with a group of students. These are a new-to-me puzzle that I learned about from Jeffrey Wanko. Usually, I’m drawn to logic puzzles involving numbers. (I’ve posted about KenKen, Futoshiki, Hashi, Shikaku, and Paint by Number puzzles before.) But, these have no numbers involved. Actually, there …