The Colors-of-Fall Carnival: Playful Math #160

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the 160th 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!

By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 160th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.

Try This Puzzle/Activity

Appropriately for an October carnival, 160 is an evil number.

A number is evil if it has an even number of ones in binary form. Can you find the binary version of 160? (Hint: Exploding Dots.)

160 is also a polyiamond number. If you connect 9 equilateral triangles side-to-side, a complete set of 9-iamond shapes would have 160 pieces.

But sets that large can be overwhelming. Try playing with smaller sets of polyiamonds. Download some triangle-dot graph paper and see how many different polyiamond shapes you can make.

What do you notice? Does it make you wonder?

What designs can you create with your polyiamonds?


Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Click here for all the mathy goodness!

Get a Weekly Dose of Playful Math

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Our leaves haven’t started to turn yet, but summer’s on the wane, farmers are busy with harvest, and the back-to-school rush has calmed down into a daily routine.

But if you’re like me, you keep tweaking that routine, constantly looking for the perfect balance for your family or classroom. I especially love to discover easy ways to add more playful math to our schedule.

So here’s a collection of sites that offer fresh math resources on a weekly or monthly basis throughout the school year.

Which one will you try?

KenKen Classroom

Every week, they’ll email you a set of free KenKen arithmetic puzzles for all ages. As the challenge level subtly shifts week to week, students develop their math and logical thinking skills without even knowing it.

Subscribe ❯

#MathStratChat

Pose an interesting math problem. How can you figure it out? What else could you do? How many different ways can you find? Which strategy do you like best for this problem?

Follow Pam Harris on your favorite social media site to get a new problem every Wednesday.

Choose a Problem ❯

The Parallel Universe

Dr Simon Singh, author of the No. 1 bestseller Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets has created a set of weekly maths challenges – just 15-30 minutes of interesting, fun and challenging tidbits of mystery and history, activities and oddities, puzzles and problems.

Help students expand their mathematical horizons beyond the school curriculum and build strong mathematical thinking skills. Stretch your brain every week!

Learn More ❯

Playful Math Carnival #154: The Math Journaling Edition

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the 154th 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!

By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 154th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.

Try This Puzzle/Activity

Since 154 is a nonagonal number, I think you might enjoy visiting some of my old “Adventures of Alexandria Jones” posts about figurate numbers:

And then try this math journaling prompt: Build or draw your own nonagonal numbers — numbers built from 9-sided polygons.

How many nonagonal numbers can you find? What do you notice? Does it make you wonder?

Click here for all the mathy goodness!

How Will You Celebrate this Epic Twosday?

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Tomorrow is Tuesday 2/22/22 (or 22/2/22, if you prefer). What a wonderfully epic Twosday!

Here’s a puzzle your family or class may enjoy…

The “All 2s” Challenge

Use only the digit 2, and try to use as few of them as you can for each calculation. You may use any math operations you know.

For example:
0 = 2 − 2
8 = 2 + 2 + 2 + 2

  • Can you find a way to make 8 using fewer than four 2s?
  • What other numbers can you make?
  • Can you calculate all the numbers from 1–20? 1–100?

Putting 2 in Perspective

You might enjoy practicing your math art skills with this 2-digit challenge from Steve Wyborney.

How many blocks make the digit 2? How did you count them?

Playful Math #152: Auld Lang Syne Edition

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the 152nd 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 January, so I’m squeezing this in between other commitments. This is my third no-host-emergency carnival in the last year, which is NOT sustainable. If you’d like to help keep the Playful Math Carnival alive, we desperately need hosts for 2022!

By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle or activity in honor of our 152nd edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.

Math Journaling with Prime Numbers

Cool facts about 152: The eighth prime number is 19, and 8 × 19 = 152. When you square 152, you get a number that contains all the digits from 0–4. You can make 152 as the sum of eight consecutive even numbers, or as the sum of four consecutive prime numbers.

But 152 has two real claims to fame:

  • It’s the smallest number that is the sum of the cubes of two distinct odd primes.
  • And it’s the largest known even number you can write as the sum of two primes in exactly four ways.

So here’s your math investigation prompt:

  • Play around with prime numbers. Explore their powers, their sums, and anything else about them you like.
  • What do you notice? What do you wonder?
  • What’s the most interesting number relationship you can find?

Continue reading Playful Math #152: Auld Lang Syne Edition

Did You Get Your Puzzle Calendar?

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Earlier this week, I sent out my last Playful Math Newsletter to email subscribers.

Most months, my newsletter includes tips and activity ideas for playing math with your kids. But from time to time, I give away a free sample of whatever I’ve been working on — an early draft of something that will eventually show up in one of my books or printable activity guides.

This month’s gift was a Pentomino Puzzle Calendar, a daily adventure in spatial reasoning.

(If you’re a subscriber, be sure to check your inbox!)

For those who haven’t signed up yet, follow this link for more information:

Join Our Playful Math Email Newsletter

And if you hit “Reply” to your welcome email and ask for a printable Pentomino Puzzle Calendar of your own, I’ll send you one right away.

Playful Math Journaling: Preorder on Kickstarter

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Are you looking for new ways to explore math with your kids?

Would you like an easy, no-prep resource for creative problem-solving, number play, math art, word problems, mini-essays, math poetry, geometry investigations, research projects, and much more?

I’ve just launched a Kickstarter project for people to preorder my new book, 312 Things To Do with a Math Journal. It just might transform your child’s experience of math.

In a math journal, children explore their own ideas about numbers, shapes, and patterns through drawing or writing in response to a question. Journaling teaches them to see with mathematical eyes. Not just to remember what we adults tell them, but to create their own math.

Scroll down the Kickstarter project page to download the free 16-page printable “Math Journaling Sampler” file. It includes one of my all-time favorite math activities.

If you like what you see, I’d love to have your support. The more people we can get to share the project in the early days, the more likely Kickstarter will join in and promote it to new readers.

Have fun playing math with your kids!

Visit the Playful Math Journaling Kickstarter page

Playful Math Education Carnival 147

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Welcome to the 147th 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!

By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle in honor of our 147th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.

Continue reading Playful Math Education Carnival 147

New! Your Student Can Be a Math Maker

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

When children create their own math, they build a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and relationships.

And it’s fun!

So take a break from your normal math program to play with creative math. Students can:

Check Out the Gallery

We have a few entries already in the Student Math Makers Gallery.

Click Here To Visit the Gallery

Join the Student Math Makers

We’d love to add your students’ math to our collection and share it with viewers all around the world!

To submit a math creation, download a Math Makers Invitation and Submission Form below:

 
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This blog is reader-supported.

If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please head to my Patreon page.

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal: paypal.me/DeniseGaskinsMath. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

“New! Your Student Can Be a Math Maker” copyright © 2021 by Denise Gaskins. “Creating Math Puzzles by Sian Zelbo, the author of Camp Logic, via NaturalMath.com.

Playful Math Carnival 144: Anniversary Edition

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

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.

Bookmark this post, so you can take your time browsing.

There’s so much playful math to enjoy!

By tradition, we would start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 144th edition. But this time, I want to take a peek back at the history of our carnival.

But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.

Continue reading Playful Math Carnival 144: Anniversary Edition