Equation Rotation Puzzle

This Equation Rotation Puzzle post has been in the works for quite a long time. I ran across this puzzle several years ago in Puzzle Box Volume 2, one of three amazing volumes of puzzles put together by the Grabarchuk family. I can’t say enough good things about these books.

If you take a look at my Puzzles Page, so many of those puzzles are originally from these books.

The equation rotation puzzle was created by Erich Friedman. I highly recommend checking out his excellent website which is chock-full of tons of free puzzles. It involves eight strips that include numbers and various math symbols.

The task of the equation rotation puzzle is to rotate and rearrange these eight strips so that four valid equations appear across the four rows. In each equation, operations should be performed from left to right.

I printed the eight strips on 11 x 17 cardstock. And, that’s actually the reason why this puzzle and blog post have taken so long to get completed and end up here on my blog. I originally typed this puzzle up back in 2018.

Life got crazy. I was pregnant that entire school year. Last year, I went to print the puzzle, and my school’s copy machine malfunctioned and didn’t want to print this particular file. I couldn’t print it at home because I just have a regular laser printer that isn’t capable of printing on 11 x 17 cardstock.

This year my school got a new copier, so I decided to see if the new printer would play nice with the file of this puzzle. It worked, and that’s the story of how it took over two years to go from a file on my computer to a puzzle ready to hand on my dry erase board.

I placed magnets (thank you Amazon for selling bulk magnets!) on the back of each strip so that students can easily manipulate the pieces as they attempt to solve the puzzle.

Of course, I’m sure you’re aware that we are currently in the midst of a pandemic (and my students are actually all learning from home at the moment), so I’m not sure when I’ll actually get to use this magnetic version with students.

But, I’m so relieved to finally mark this puzzle off my to do list where it’s been living for the last two years.

The equation rotation puzzle was a fun puzzle to tackle myself. I did force myself to sit down and solve it to make sure it could be done before posting it here on the blog.

I actually had to break out pen and paper for a bit to try and organize my thinking. It was interesting to thing about what sort of strips had to come first/last/etc.