Surds Extensions
Saw this great question on the 2016 UKMT Senior Maths Challenge and wondered whether it would be possible to make some of my own. I had just been teaching Surds and wanted some nice enrichment that linked surds to indices. I realised that you can nicely create your own by working backwards from the answer…
Creating from UKMT
The wonder of the UKMT I have said before on this blog that I absolutely adore the UK Maths Challenge as a way of massively improving your problem solving skills and using preexisting tools in totally new ways. It’s also an absolute goldmine for interesting purposeful practice. One of my favourite way of creating resources…
Quadratics on Quadratics
Stacks of Quadratics Firstly I would urge you to try the question in the photo yourself. It requires some knowledge of powers and solving quadratics and is wonderfully satisfying to find all SIX solutions. Looking at easier examples Questions like this are a great example of finding creative ways to practice fundamental skills. In this…
Asking for a fence
Farmers’ Area Problems I recently came across this fencing problem posed by two mathematically minded farmers, the first part of which I feel is rather well known. Questions such as these are easy to visualise, meaning you can often give an instinctive answer and then test if your intuition was correct after solving the problem.…
Cracking the Cryptic: Joy and Magic Squares
Magic Squares Magic squares always feel like a go-to end of term fun activity and one I have never given a particularly large amount of thought to – when I saw this question come up on a facebook maths page I am a member of I wasn’t sure how easy it would be but I…
DOTS: One Trick to Solve Them All
The problems: These three seemingly very different questions all showed up in the same SMC paper in 2017. Try each one yourself and see if you can work out what one trick links them all together! DOTS: A Party Trick I’ve always been thrilled by the ability of using the “Difference of two squares” to…
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We think playing with and learning from puzzles are some of the best ways to explore maths – see if you can try the puzzles yourself before delving into the whole post!
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