math them

There are a number of interesting ways to make a two-player game out of coloring the vertices of graphs. We'll look at a couple.

Today we'll look at an old puzzle that has gone by many names over the centuries, my favorite name being "The Great Tantalizer." The most popular recent iteration was Parker Brothers' "Instant Insanity," so that's what most people call it. We'll look at some variations that let students explore how this puzzle might be easy (or at least easier ), hard, or impossible.

A nice source of generalizations for classic games played on a tabletop is porting them over to other surfaces. Today we'll look at Tic Tac Toe on more exotic surfaces than the standard \(3 \times 3\) board.

In order to spice up classical combinatorial games, mathematicians have explored what happens if, instead of alternating turns, players bid each turn for the opportunity to make a move. Here we'll look at Tic Tac Toe with such a bidding scheme.

Gord Hamilton's Kickstarter for The Infinite Pickle is very close to meeting its goal, so I thought today we'd look at a small corner of Boring Conversations , an activity from this collection that was presented this week at the Math Incubator workshop.

My colleague, Daniel Kline, was looking at chain linking manipulative and wondering what activities could make use of them. While he's working on an activity based on symmetries, I thought I would write one up based on de Bruijn sequences.

When JRMF throws a festival, some activities will invariably be more popular than others. When we introduce enough new activities, some old ones stop stacking up against the rest. While a new activity eclipsing an old one isn't a terrible problem to have, Ladybugs is currently not a fan favorite, and it is one of our more outwardly arithmetical activities. Since having a few arithmetic-forward activities in the bunch make it easier to sell our offerings as mathematical to the skeptical, we'll take a look at it as it stands and consider a reimagining.

Combinatorial game theory is a deep well to draw from in the math enrichment world. JRMF has Apple Picking , Countdown , Rook's Move , and Sprigs on the books. I thought we'd look at the classic Grundy's Game and a few variations. I'll take this as an opportunity to introduce a few concepts useful in analyzing combinatorial games, more broadly.