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'Doughnut Percents' printed from https://nrich.maths.org/

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Why do this problem?

This team-building task is designed to develop students' team-working skills. If you wish to learn more about these skills, and find other team-builder tasks, take a look at this article.
This task depends upon members of the group noticing the needs of others and responding. It requires students to:

 

 

  • respond to the needs of others
  • consider the needs of the whole group
  • help others to do things for themselves.

 

Possible approach

Share the purposes of the activity and the rules with the group.

Ask team leaders to hand the cards out randomly - four dominoes to each group member.


If you have more than four people in a group then use an observer to ensure the team obeys the rules, and note when there is evidence of members of the team responding to the needs of others, as well as to place a hint card in the middle if one is needed.

Here are the rule cards and the hint cards.


As teams finish, ask them to discuss what they have learnt about working together. Use observers to feed into the discussions. Then spend some time discussing as a class how they might work more effectively in future.


Key questions

As this task is designed to be carried out in silence, the use of key questions is inappropriate during the task but can inform discussion of team behaviours when the task is complete.


Can you give any good examples of when someone noticed what you needed and tried to help?

 

Possible support

Set A from Matching Fractions, Decimals and Percentages would be a suitable introductory problem.
Other skill-building tasks can be found by going to this article.

 

Possible extension

The dominoes can also be arranged into a pair of doughnuts or one large doughnut. Ask the team to create these shapes.

Other skill-building tasks can be found by going to this article.

Sets B and C from Matching Fractions, Decimals and Percentages would be a suitable follow-up problem if your focus is on number work rather than team building.