Twizzle, a female giraffe, needs transporting to another zoo. Which
route will give the fastest journey?
Go through the maze, collecting and losing your money as you go.
Which route gives you the highest return? And the lowest?
Each child in Class 3 took four numbers out of the bag. Who had
made the highest even number?
Tim had nine cards each with a different number from 1 to 9 on it. How could he have put them into three piles so that the total in each pile was 15?
Start by putting one million (1 000 000) into the display of your
calculator. Can you reduce this to 7 using just the 7 key and add,
subtract, multiply, divide and equals as many times as you like?
Phoebe and Alice put a 100 square to very good use in answering this problem.
Go to last month's problems to see more solutions.
All types of mathematical problems serve a useful purpose in
mathematics teaching, but different types of problem will achieve
different learning objectives. In generalmore open-ended problems
have greater potential.