Being Curious - Upper Primary is part of our Being a Good Thinker - Upper Primary collection.
Good thinkers are curious and ask good questions. They are excited by new ideas and are keen to explore and investigate them.
Want to become a more curious mathematician?
These problems will exploit your natural curiosity and encourage you to ask good mathematical questions.
You can browse through the Number, Measures, Geometry or Statistics collections, or scroll down to see the full set of problems below.
If the world were a village
This activity is based on data in the book 'If the World Were a Village'. How will you represent your chosen data for maximum effect?
Dicey operations
In these addition and subtraction games, you'll need to think strategically to get closest to the target.
How many times?
On a digital 24 hour clock, at certain times, all the digits are consecutive. How many times like this are there between midnight and 7 a.m.?
A puzzling cube
Here are the six faces of a cube - in no particular order. Here are three views of the cube. Can you deduce where the faces are in relation to each other and record them on the net of this cube?
Tricky track
Brush loads
How can you arrange the 5 cubes so that you need the smallest number of Brush Loads of paint to cover them? Try with other numbers of cubes as well.
Torn shapes
Cows and sheep
Coded hundred square
This 100 square jigsaw is written in code. It starts with 1 and ends with 100. Can you build it up?
Nice or nasty
There are nasty versions of this dice game but we'll start with the nice ones...
National flags
Sealed solution
Two clocks
These clocks have only one hand, but can you work out what time they are showing from the information?
Three neighbours
Take three consecutive numbers and add them together. What do you notice?
Dice in a corner
How could you arrange at least two dice in a stack so that the total of the visible spots is 18?