Alphabetical Puzzlers
This week’s Puzzle Corner is a collection of puzzles dealing with letters of the alphabet. While they are not necessarily mathematical in nature (although one could argue this point), these puzzles...
View ArticleRainforest Riddle
How can you get each animal to its home without any of their paths crossing? Materials Student Sheet: The anaconda, the jaguar, and the howler monkey all live in the same part of the rainforest. As...
View ArticleThe Relative Riddle
This week’s Puzzle Corner is a classic riddle requiring reasoning to reconcile. (Please forgive the crude alliteration.) While many of you have encountered this riddle before and already know the...
View ArticleAlternate Arrangements
Six drinking glasses are arranged in a row. The first three are filled with water; the next three are empty. Is it possible to get the full and empty glasses to alternate by moving only one glass? This...
View ArticleFamily Ties
This weeks’s Puzzle Corner activity is a collection of three riddles all dealing with the relationships between relatives. The first one is thought to be many hundreds of years old and is one of the...
View ArticleLocating Legs
This week’s Puzzle Corner activity has a holiday theme. In it, students are presented with a paradoxical scenario and asked to try to make sense of it. In this scenario a child is hiding under a table...
View ArticleIt’s a Snap!
This week’s Puzzle Corner activity is an adaptation of a classic puzzle from recreational mathematics. It is traditionally posed as a thought problem to be worked out in your head; as such, it is...
View ArticlePuzzling Over Prices
The Puzzle Corner activity this week is a thought puzzle that presents an interesting paradox. Solving it will require some divergent thinking on the part of your students. Puzzles like this one appeal...
View ArticlePuzzling Problems
Is is against the law for a man to marry his widow’s sister? Trick questions like this one almost always pique our interest. We usually delight in these cleverly crafted riddles and brain teasers that...
View ArticleShrinking Square Challenge
This week’s Puzzle Corner activity is a seemingly simple one that may prove more difficult than one might expect. In it, students place four pennies on the corners of the square pictured. They are then...
View ArticleRelative Reckonings
This week’s Puzzle Corner activity comes from the field of recreational mathematics where people do math just for the fun of it. One of the areas of recreational mathematics is logic. Logic puzzles are...
View ArticleA Touchy Situation
I am indebted to Robert Benjamin, a scientist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for A Touchy Situation. Bob first did this activity with his son when his son was in kindergarten. Therefore, he...
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