Welcome to the 150th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
Bookmark this post, so you can take your time browsing.
There’s so much playful math to enjoy!
We didn’t have a volunteer host for October, so I’m squeezing this in between extended-family situations that require my time. If you’d like to help keep the Playful Math Carnival alive, we desperately need hosts for 2022!
Try These Sum-Difference Puzzles
By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 150th edition. This puzzle comes from the archives of Iva Sallay’s delightful Find the Factors blog.
Copy the puzzle diagrams below. Write numbers in the boxes to make true statements going uphill, and use the same numbers to make true statements going downhill:
Six has two factor pairs. One of those factor pairs adds up to 5, and the other one subtracts to 5. Can you place those factors in the proper boxes to complete the first puzzle?
150 has six factor pairs. One of those factor pairs adds up to 25, and another one subtracts to 25. If you can identify those factor pairs, then you can complete the second puzzle!
How are the two puzzles related?
Iva also posts one of my favorite multiplication puzzles, her scrambled times tables. Check out puzzle #150 in this post (it’s Level 3, or medium difficulty) and then browser her site for plenty more.
Welcome to the 144th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
Children can model planar graphs with three-dimensional constructions using small balls of playdough (vertices) connected by toothpicks (edges).
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 