Card game – mod 8!

We played a game posted on youtube by Mr Allen.

Here are his instructions:

This is a card game I made up where you do basic mental calculations and race your opponent ( 2-4 players). Using Ace -10 cards only. Rules: 7 cards are placed face up for each player and two in the middle. The player who gets rid of their cards first wins. You can put a card in the middle (on top of either pile) when one of your cards is an answer to an expression using the two cards in the middle. eg. if 6 and 2 are in the middle possible cards that can be played are 8 (6+2) or 4 (6-2) or 3 (6 divided by 2) or 2 (6×2) – 12 is the answer but we use the last digit only. Each player has to say the expression as they put the card down. eg 6 twos are 12 – placing the 2. or 6 minus/take/sub 2 is 4. all players play on until no cards can be played. Then the dealer deals each player a card then put one on one of the two middle piles. Players then race to place cards until someone gets rid of all their cards! (4 players start with 6 cards)

We played a few games of this and made up our own versions:

  1. Instead of a race we played in turn – competitively or collaboratively
  2. We removed the 9s and 10s and played in mod 8

Cereal Box Problem

Suppose there was one of six toy animals inside your favorite box of cereal and you would like to collect them all.

You could be lucky and only buy six boxes, but how many boxes of cereal would you expect to have to buy on average?

With thanks to this website we carried out an experiment with dice to simulate this problem:

Click here for a pdf with several blank tables to cut out and use.

We then used python to generate 1000 trials and compared our average to the theoretical average we calculated.