It’s always a challenge to keep up with homeschooling during the holiday season, but here’s a wonderful way to weave mathematics into your daily schedule: The Nrich Advent Calendars offer a fun math game or activity for every day in December until Christmas Eve. Click the image to visit the calendar that fits your student’s level.
I love logic puzzles! Nrich Maths offers four fun Olympics Logic puzzles. And be sure to check out the rest of their Nrich Olympics Math as well.
Medals Count
Given the following clues, can you work out the number of gold, silver and bronze medals that France, Italy and Japan got in this international sports competition?
- Japan has 1 more gold medal, but 3 fewer silver medals, than Italy.
- France has the most bronze medals (18), but fewest gold medals (7).
- Each country has at least 6 medals of each type.
- Italy has 27 medals in total.
- Italy has 2 more bronze medals than gold medals.
- The three countries have 38 bronze medals in total.
- France has twice as many silver medals as Italy has gold medals.
Vi Hart repents with an update to her last video: “Take that, mathematics!”
In 1905, when he was 26 years old, Albert Einstein rocked the scientific world with a series of papers that changed our understanding of the nature of the universe. At MinutePhysics, the celebration continues:
Happy Pi Day, from Vi Hart:
Today would be Albert Einstein’s 133rd birthday. At MinutePhysics, the celebration continues:
March 14th is Pi Day, and it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday. In honor of Einstein, MinutePhysics is posting a series of videos on his “wonder year” of 1905, when he published several papers that eventually earned him the Nobel Prize.
Astronomer Dr Meghan Gray explains how messed up our calendar is. The mis-match between the length of a day and the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun makes a leap year necessary. From Numberphile.
Lance Friedman of MathPlane.com has posted two bits of fun in honor of Super Bowl XLVI. (Click the images to go to Lance’s site.) And if you’re a homeschooler, Currclick is offering a Super Bowl Mini-Helper free this week.
Continue reading Super Bowl XLVI Math Worksheet and Football Comic
photo by Creativity103 via flickr
For our homeschool, January is the time to assess our progress and make a few New Semester’s Resolutions. This year, we resolve to challenge ourselves to more math puzzles. Would you like to join us? Pump up your mental muscles with the 2012 Mathematics Game!
Use the digits in the year 2012 to write mathematical expressions for the counting numbers 1 through 100.
- You must use all four digits. You may not use any other numbers.
- You may use +, -, x, ÷, sqrt (square root), ^ (raise to a power), ! (factorial), and parentheses, brackets, or other grouping symbols.
- You may use a decimal point to create numbers such as .2, .01, etc.
- You may create multi-digit numbers such as 10 or 202, but we prefer 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 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: Math Forum modified their rules to allow double factorials, but as far as I know, they do not allow repeating decimals or triple factorials.]
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 