Use your hand span to measure the distance around a tree trunk. If you ask a friend to try the same thing, how do the answers compare?
At the beginning of May Tom put his tomato plant outside. On the same day he sowed a bean in another pot. When will the two be the same height?
If I use 12 green tiles to represent my lawn, how many different ways could I arrange them? How many border tiles would I need each time?
There are four equal weights on one side of the scale and an apple on the other side. What can you say that is true about the apple and the weights from the picture?
We went to the cinema and decided to buy some bags of popcorn so we asked about the prices. Investigate how much popcorn each bag holds so find out which we might have bought.
Can you fit the tangram pieces into the outlines of these clocks?
In 1871 a mathematician called Augustus De Morgan died. De Morgan made a puzzling statement about his age. Can you discover which year De Morgan was born in?
In this version of the story of the hare and the tortoise, the race is 10 kilometres long. Can you work out how long the hare sleeps for using the information given?
Use 4 four times with simple operations so that you get the answer 12. Can you make 15, 16 and 17 too?
Try a fun LOGO tiling
In the four examples below identical squares of side one unit contain some circles shaded blue. In which of the four examples is the shaded area greatest?
This addition sum uses all ten digits 0, 1, 2...9 exactly once. Find the sum and show that the one you give is the only possibility.
Find some triples of whole numbers a, b and c such that a^2 + b^2 + c^2 is a multiple of 4. Is it necessarily the case that a, b and c must all be even? If so, can you explain why?
You can work out the number someone else is thinking of as follows. Ask a friend to think of any natural number less than 100. Then ask them to tell you the remainders when this number is divided by. . . .
Find the smallest positive integer N such that N/2 is a perfect cube, N/3 is a perfect fifth power and N/5 is a perfect seventh power.
a) A four digit number (in base 10) aabb is a perfect square. Discuss ways of systematically finding this number. (b) Prove that 11^{10}-1 is divisible by 100.
Rotate a copy of the trapezium about the centre of the longest side of the blue triangle to make a square. Find the area of the square and then derive a formula for the area of the trapezium.
In how many ways can the number 1 000 000 be expressed as the product of three positive integers?
A tetrahedron has two identical equilateral triangles faces, of side length 1 unit. The other two faces are right angled isosceles triangles. Find the exact volume of the tetrahedron.
ABCD is a rectangle and P, Q, R and S are moveable points on the edges dividing the edges in certain ratios. Strangely PQRS is always a cyclic quadrilateral and you can find the angles.