Take a counter and surround it by a ring of other counters that
MUST touch two others. How many are needed?
These squares have been made from Cuisenaire rods. Can you describe
the pattern? What would the next square look like?
We can arrange dots in a similar way to the 5 on a dice and they
usually sit quite well into a rectangular shape. How many
altogether in this 3 by 5? What happens for other sizes?
Although this problem 'just' involved some
calculating, explaining the results was a little more tricky.
Charlie, Tom, James and Jonathan from Avenue Junior School looked
at the journeys that Tom and Ben made:
Jessica from Egerton Primary School
described how her class found lots of different ways of going from
B to E on the grid:
Harry, who goes to St Anne's Primary
School, had a go at the routes on all three grids. He
Harry also played around with the grids a bit,
changing addition to multiplication and subtraction to division or
vice versa. This changed the answer but the answer was still
always the same, no matter what route you took.
Jack and Skye from Swavesey Primary had a go
at the third grid. They said:
Above, Jessica began to explain why she
thought she always got $28$ on the first two grids. The Maths
Galaxy Explorers from North Walsham Junior School clearly thought
very hard about this:
Well done too to Barbara, Cong and Nazra
from Arnhem Wharf Primary School who also realised that they would
always get the same score for a particular grid.