by MathPickle | Feb 25, 2026 |
Stirring Paint (MathPickle, 2020) Above is a solution to a stirring paint puzzle. Can you guess the rules? #1 When the puzzle is solved, each colour forms exactly one loop. Example: if you start with the blue in the upper left, you move one space to a blue arrow...
by MathPickle | Feb 23, 2026 |
Crumbling Castles (MathPickle, 2025) Ready for some inductive problem solving? You can first try to figure out what’s going on yourself… Here is the puzzlesheet. Spend 5 minutes looking for aptterns and then read on so you’ll see how to present it to...
by MathPickle | Feb 4, 2026 |
Minimal trips around the Collatz Galaxy (MathPickle, 2025) What’s going on in this loop? We are going to present it to students as a mystery to be discovered. The solution above is a failure. Whenever you are telling a classroom of students that they failed, you...
by MathPickle | Dec 31, 2025 |
Frobenius’ Beast Bait (MathPickle, 2025) To introduce Beast Bait, get students to choose a target creature number between 5 and 25. Let’s say the target number is 9. It is then a classroom competition to find a set of integers that can be added together in...
by MathPickle | Sep 13, 2025 |
Zebra (Dalhousie University Students, 2025) (Inspired by the game Omega by Néstor Romeral Andrés) The 7×7 board in the video is too big for grade four. Start with a smaller board. Here are a whole bunch to choose from: Pencil & Paper version (2 colours of...
