Chippy's Journeys

'Chippy's Journeys' printed from https://nrich.maths.org/

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We received lots of correct answers to the first part of this problem but very few of you told us how you went about solving it. Some of you drew a diagram of Chippy's route, which was a very good way of tackling it. Rukmini from Hopscotch Nursery and Christy, sent particularly clear pictures. Here is Rukmini's:

Rukmini says:

First I took some checked paper and drew a map showing North, East, West and South. In the centre was the Base station which I marked as B on the map. From B, I counted squares Chippy went along. He seemed to go a bit round and round till he forgot where the basic station was. I marked with a 'S' where he stopped. I drew his way back with crosses. He needed to go $2$ m West to get back to the Base station.

Tom who lives in New Zealand, solved the the first part of problem in a different, but equally as good way. Here is what Tom says:

This is a table showing how many metres Chippy went:

	N	S	E	W
	2	2	2	3
	3	5	2	3
	3	1	4
Total	8	8	8	6

The north and the south amounts were the same so there was no change there, but the east and the west amounts were different. The east was $2$ metres more than the west. So you have to go $2$ metres in west at the end to get to Chippy's station.

Well done to you all for your well explained solutions.