Lycee Francais SAMI Maths Club – Page 12 – Fun maths every Thursday 1pm in 927

Card sums

Today we did one of the 52 activities in mathemagician Andrew Jeffrey’s great book. Andrew very kindly donated the proceeds of this book to SAMI.

This activity involved shuffling the Aces through to 9s in a pack of cards and setting them out in the following format to gain the biggest total. The first two cards represent a two digit number. We played many games of 1 min each to see who could find the biggest total (without a calculator!) and then enjoyed discussing strategy until we found (we think!) a perfect strategy.

The total for the layout of the cards at the top would be 97×1+17*5=182. Can you do better with those six cards?

Kaxo

We played a really fun version of Nim today. The online version seems to work best with two players. We found the computer only chooses to mark one dot each time … which is not a winning strategy!

Squares in squares in puzzles

First challenge – squares in squares puzzle

Today we revisted one of our favourite puzzles.

Graceful Creatures

Today we proved that all six noded creatures are graceful! To see what this means you can try out the activities here or watch this numberphile video.

Balance scale puzzles

Here are a few of our favourite balance scale puzzles.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_puzzle

https://www.mathsisfun.com/puzzles/weighing-10-bags.html

Pi Day

This week we ran a treasure hunt round the school and a pi recital competition and in maths club we used Geogebra to estimate pi .

Turtle race

We did some computer programming with Python today in maths club – using the brilliant Code Club website.

Motorway problem

Imagine four towns in a square system with side length 1 mile.

You would like to connect all four towns by motorways, using the least amount of road (not necessarily the most efficient for any one particular town).