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Babymath: Story Problem Challenge III

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/goetter/2352128932/"Photo by Raphael Goetter via Flickr

Alex and Leon enjoyed their baby sister, but they were amazed at how much work taking care of a baby could be. One particularly colicky night, everyone in the family took turns holding the baby, rocking the baby, patting her back, and walking her around before she finally succumbed to sleep.

Then Alex collapsed on the couch, and Leon sank into the recliner. They teased each other with these story problems.

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Top 10 Posts of 2010

Cartoon showing baby representing New Year 190...
Image via Wikipedia

2011 will be a fantastic year — or at least, a prime one! (See these posts by Gary, Pat, and James.) But as we move into the new year, it’s also a good time to look back and to look ahead: What did we accomplished last year? And what comes next?

More specifically, for bloggers:

  • What did people like to read?
  • How can I give them more of it?

So here is my retrospective look at the most popular blog posts of 2010, along with related blogging goals (or dreams?) for 2011.

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2011 Mathematics Game

[Photo from Wikipedia.]

Two of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions are to spend more time with family and friends, and to get more exercise. The 2011 Mathematics Game is a chance to do both at once.

So grab a partner, slip into your workout clothes, and pump up those mental muscles!

Here are the rules:

Use the digits in the year 2011 to write mathematical expressions for the counting numbers 1 through 100.

  • All four digits must be used in each expression. You may not use any other numbers except 2, 0, 1, and 1.
  • You may use the arithmetic operations +, -, x, ÷, sqrt (square root), ^ (raise to a power), and ! (factorial). You may also use parentheses, brackets, or other grouping symbols.
  • You may use a decimal point to create numbers such as .1, .02, etc.
  • Multi-digit numbers such as 20 or 102 may be used, but preference is given to solutions that avoid them.

Bonus Rules
You may use the overhead-bar (vinculum), dots, or brackets to mark a repeating decimal.

You may use multifactorials:

  • (n!)! = a factorial of a factorial, which is not the same as a multifactorial
  • n!! = a double factorial = the product of all integers from 1 to n that have the same parity (odd or even) as n
  • n!!! = a triple factorial = the product of all integers from 1 to n that are equal to n mod 3

[Note to teachers: The bonus rules are not part of the Math Forum guidelines. They make a significant difference in the number of possible solutions, however, and they should not be too difficult for high school students or advanced middle schoolers.]

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Graph-It Game

[Photo by Scott Schram via Flickr.]

For Leon’s Christmas gift, Alex made the Graph-It game. She wrapped a pad of graph paper and wrote up the instructions:

To play Graph-It, one person designs a picture made by connecting points on a coordinate graph. He reads the points to the other player, who tries to reproduce the picture.

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Renée’s Platonic Mobile

Alexandria Jones struggled to think of a Christmas gift that a one-month-old baby could enjoy, but finally she got an idea.

She cut empty cereal boxes to make regular polygons: 6 squares, 12 regular pentagons, and 32 equilateral triangles. Using small pieces of masking tape, she carefully formed the five Platonic solids. Then she mixed flour and water into a runny paste. She tore an old newspaper into small strips and soaked them in the paste. She covered each solid with a thin layer of paper.

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