math them

Today we'll look at some reconfigurations of the 2x2x2 Rubik's cube that allow for different explorations and lower the floor.

When I was a grad student, I used to keep a basket of burr puzzles on my coffee table for guests to fiddle with. Today we'll look at an activity where students design them before solving them!

I first encountered Numberlink puzzles in the (numberless) Flow Free app and appreciated them because they were a little more topological than the typical logic puzzle.

Daniel Kline has been playing around with an in-person version of Panning for Gold and was wondering what other puzzle variants could be done on a balance scale. This post is an attempt to answer that question!

Here we'll look at some of the mathematics behind a cheap, commercially available peg solitaire puzzle.

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.

Polygon dissections have been a source of amusement and wonder in recreational mathematics for centuries. Today we'll look at a few related activity threads.

My colleague Daniel Kline has been playing around with a novel set of puzzles to be solved with a Soma cube that should hopefully hit the website in coming months. I wanted to create something that was less reliant on gravity and friction and ended up with a slightly more traditional puzzle set.

Today we'll look at some puzzles based on Neil Sloane's presentation of the stepping stones puzzle, given in this Numberphile video .

I try to design activities every once in a while that have a tie-in to another discipline. Here we'll look at a collection of puzzles that are superficially about words but are more about geometry and arithmetic once you start looking for strategies.

As an undergraduate, I stumbled upon Jim Propp's Self-Referential Aptitude Test and spent a couple hours working on it. That experience stuck with me and I have since made smaller-scale versions and variants for students. This is a hard activity to pin down to an age group, but it can skew a little more abstract and occasionally arithmetic, so I'd peg it around 7th grade and up but have definitely had some luck with advanced elementary school children.