Math Adventures for All Ages

Activities, puzzles, games, discussion-starters, and more. These sites don’t fit into a grade-level pigeonhole, but allow people of all ages to play with math together.

Alice: A downloadable programming system that allows students to learn by creating animated movies and simple video games.

Codecademy: Interactive lessons in a variety of programming languages, along with project ideas and forums for asking questions.

CS Unplugged: Learning activities that teach computer science through offline games and puzzles using cards, string, crayons and lots of running around.

Cut the Knot Interactive: “Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles,” one of my all-time favorite sites.

Daily Treasure: Solve the logic puzzle to find the hidden gold.

Don Cohen’s Map of Calculus for Young People: Hands-on activities featuring advanced ideas, for students of any age. Check out my introductory blog post Infinite Cake: Don Cohen’s Infinite Series for Kids.

Estimation 180: “Building number sense one day at a time.” How close can you guess? Why did you pick that number?

Famous Problems in the History of Mathematics: This site includes problems, paradoxes, and proofs that have inspired mathematicians through the ages, plus links for further exploration.

Fun Mathematics Lessons by Cynthia Lanius: A variety of topics and investigations.

Geometry Lessons in the Waldorf School: Freehand Form Drawing and Basic Geometric Construction: (Includes link to free download) The book says “Grades 4 and 5,” but Waldorf-style geometry doodling is fun for all ages.

Golden Sales Pitch: “There is little evidence to suggest that the golden ratio has any special aesthetic appeal… When a myth is repeated over and over, it begins to sound like truth.”

History of Mathematical Games and Recreations: “The whole history of mathematics is interwoven with mathematical games which have led to the study of many areas of mathematics.”

Hotel Infinity: Tova Brown’s growing collection of videos that explore advanced math concepts through story-telling.

Hour of Code: Game-like computer programming tutorials for beginners and beyond.

Islamic Art and Geometric Design: (pdf download) Lesson plans from the Metropolitan Museum.

Jill Britton’s Home Page: A wealth of links and resources for playing with topology, symmetry, tessellations, and polyhedra.

Math Hombre Games: Links to math games on GVSU math professor John Golden’s blog, games on other people’s blogs, and more games all over the Internet.

Math Is Fun: A mathematical smorgasbord of lessons, definitions, puzzles, and games.

Math Munch: A archive of delicious math activities, projects, artwork, and games from around the Internet.

Math Pickle: Videos introduce fun and challenging printable games/puzzles for K-12 students. Can your students solve the $1,000,000 problems?

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives: A treasure-chest of virtual hands-on math. Includes links to material for all ages and topics, pre-K through 12th grade.

Nrich.maths.org: A wonderful source of math puzzles and activities for all ages, with a theme that changes each month. Hints available, and solutions for past problems.

Origami and Math: David Eppstein’s Geometry Junkyard links to a slew of origami articles and projects.

Origami Instructions: You can make a variety of fun polyhedra from Sonobe modules. See also Wikipedia: Sonobe.

Pagat.com: Pagat is a wonderful collection of card game rules and variations from around the world.

Problem Solving Island: A variety of puzzles, from the book Thinking Mathematically and other sources, plus problem solving tips and sample student journal entries. Based on Problem Solving and Computing, which can serve as a self-study course for older students.

Recreational Mathematics: Games, art, humor, and more.

Tim’s Interactive Puzzle Solution Center: A fun collection of “famous and other curious brain teasers” to solve online, some relatively easy and some quite challenging.

Universcale: Compare and understand the relative size of the full range of known objects in our universe.

Visual Patterns blog: Pick any design you like and practice recognizing, describing, and predicting the pattern.

Which One Doesn’t Belong?: Christopher Danielson’s thought-provoking puzzles will challenge math teachers and students alike. Can you identify which item doesn’t belong and explain why?

Would You Rather? Math: “Asking students to choose their own path and justify it.”