Make 30 Puzzles

Your students will love this daily math puzzle challenge that involves practicing the order of operations to make 30 from a given set of numbers.

Instructions for Make 30 Puzzles

The goal of these Make 30 puzzles is to arrange the digits and any of the arithmetic operations to form an expression that evaluates to 30.

For example, the digits 0, 2, and 6 can be arranged to form 60 / 2 = 30.

Puzzle Source

These Make 30 Puzzles are the creation of retired math professor and brilliant puzzle creator Erich Friedman. Last school year, I featured his Plus Times Puzzle here on my blog.

This summer, I was super excited to check my email and see an email from Erich. He had saw my blog post about his plus times puzzles and decided to create a special set of puzzles especially for my classroom and my students to enjoy. That’s where these Make 30 Puzzles came from!

How cool is this?!? A puzzle-writing celebrity made a special set of puzzles just for my classroom! Of course, I couldn’t keep them just to myself. I want your students to get in on the fun as well!

Here’s what the Make 30 Puzzles look like on Erich Friedman’s website.

Using These Puzzles in the Classroom

I decided to create magnets that I could put up for each day. I typed the numbers 0-9 and made enough duplicate copies of the numbers to let me put up each of the different puzzles.

There are 186 different puzzles, so you could easily post a different puzzle each and every day of the school year.

I’ve decided to post my daily Make 30 puzzle under the day’s date. I just switch out the Make 30 magnets whenever I switch out my daily date magnets.

Of course, you could take the easy way out and skip the magnets altogether. Just write the day’s numbers using a dry erase marker. But, I do think the magnets make the puzzle a bit more eye-popping.

The magnets also allow students to manipulate the numbers and do something like this. I had a sub the other day, and I returned to find that a mystery student had solved the puzzle.

I actually typed up and printed two different sizes of numbers. The larger set of numbers has all of the digits needed to do the first 38 puzzles. I would print and use this set if you plan to just do these puzzles for a short amount of time or if you are working with younger students.

The puzzles definitely increase in difficulty as the puzzle numbers increase.

The smaller set of numbers has all of the digits needed to do all of the puzzles. They are sized smaller to save paper.

I’m not sure how long I want to keep this puzzle out, so I currently only added disc magnets to the set of larger magnets.

I’m currently storing the unused puzzle magnets in a plastic pouch along with a printed copy of the puzzles. Each day, I switch out the puzzle and highlight it so I can keep track of which ones I have given my students!