Showing posts with label puzzle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label puzzle. Show all posts

Sunday, 14 December 2014

Maths and you guessed it... Christmas






Here is a gift for you from Mathsland - a game. It's the latest thing and Jo Boaler of Stanford likes it so much she is now on the team..

Download Mathbreakers and puzzle it out. It looks like Mathbreakers will just keep growing too.

And this ancient game - I haven't beaten the computer yet. Can you? Cool Math - Mancala

For the next game you will need a 10 by 10 grid - this is called How Close to 100? To make it more challenging try How Close to 1 and use decimals. This is from Jo Boaler.

You will need
• two players
• two dice
• recording sheet



This game is played in partners. Two children share a blank 100 grid. The first partner rolls two number dice.
The numbers that come up are the numbers the child uses to make an array on the 100 grid. They can put the array anywhere on the grid, but the goal is to fill up the grid to get it as full as possible. After the player draws the array on the grid, she writes in the number sentence that describes the grid. The second player then rolls the dice, draws the number grid and records their number sentence. The game ends when both players have rolled the dice and cannot put any more arrays on the grid. How close to 100 can you get?
Variation Each child can have their own number grid. Play moves forward to see who can get closest to 100. 


Monday, 13 October 2014

pi 10 Trillion of its Digits - actually only 4 Million of them...

It took 371 days of computing TEN TRILLION decimal places of pi.
Doesn't sound impressive - that requires 44 TB of disk to find them and 7.6 TB to store them, when compressed.

In 1949 the ENIAC computer took 70 hours to calculate pi to 2037 digits.

Check out the Beautiful visualisation and effort in this very cool site and more on how long it would take humans to say all of these digits.

http://two-n.com/pi/


Why do we care? Because this number is everywhere, because it has no pattern, because they say inside these digits are all of our phone numbers, birth dates and every possible combination you could think of. BECAUSE humans and other animals need patterns to understand the world around them. pi is a beautiful mystery and mathematicians like you love puzzles.



"An average person can read out approximately 120 digits ..." 2012. 13 Oct. 2014 <http://www.two-n.com/pi/>