Today we solved an intriguing homework riddle with the help of a Venn diagram. We had clues such as
“Seven students in total have Maths homework but Miya isn’t one of them.”
and
“Rory has more homework than Aidan.”
Using all the clues, which you can find here, we were able to work out which students had which pieces of homework.
It was a nice challenge! The solution can be found here. This activity was originally found on the TES website.
We spent this maths club playing the highly addictive game Square it from Nrich.
This game is thanks to David Bedford at the BCME Conference in Warwick.
One person writes down a polynomial with positive integer coefficients. Call it f(x) They then choose an integer that it bigger than all their coefficients. Call it n. They then calculate f(n) and give just n and f(n) to the second person.
The second person should be able to name that polynomial! How?
Example:
Given only n=8 and f(n) = 6855 how could you work out that the polynomial was
?
It might help to think about an example when n=10 first.