Year 8 Being curious

Try out these calculations. Are you surprised by the results?

Watch our videos of multiplication methods that you may not have met before. Can you make sense of them?

This problem offers you two ways to test reactions - use them to investigate your ideas about speeds of reaction.

Crosses can be drawn on number grids of various sizes. What do you notice when you add opposite ends?

Can you find rectangles where the value of the area is the same as the value of the perimeter?

Can all unit fractions be written as the sum of two unit fractions?

A country has decided to have just two different coins. Which totals can be made? Is there a largest total that cannot be made? How do you know?

Invent a scoring system for a 'guess the weight' competition.

Think of a number and follow my instructions. Tell me your answer, and I'll tell you what you started with! Can you explain how I know?

Move your counters through this snake of cards and see how far you can go. Are you surprised by where you end up?

Imagine we have four bags containing a large number of 1s, 4s, 7s and 10s. What numbers can we make?

Can you deduce which Olympic athletics events are represented by the graphs?

Generate three random numbers to determine the side lengths of a triangle. What triangles can you draw?

What are the possible areas of triangles drawn in a square?

Join pentagons together edge to edge. Will they form a ring?

We started drawing some quadrilaterals - can you complete them?

Can you work out how these polygon pictures were drawn, and use that to figure out their angles?

We usually use squares to measure area, but what if we use triangles instead?

Which of these pocket money systems would you rather have?

Charlie and Abi put a counter on 42. They wondered if they could visit all the other numbers on their 1-100 board, moving the counter using just these two operations: ×2 and -5. What do you think?

There are lots of ideas to explore in these sequences of ordered fractions.

Can you work out what step size to take to ensure you visit all the dots on the circle?

Can you make a right-angled triangle on this peg-board by joining up three points round the edge?

Think of a two digit number, reverse the digits, and add the numbers together. Something special happens...

How can you change the surface area of a cuboid but keep its volume the same? How can you change the volume but keep the surface area the same?

Alison and Charlie are playing a game. Charlie wants to go first so Alison lets him. Was that such a good idea?

Alison and Charlie are playing a game. Charlie wants to go first so Alison lets him. Was that such a good idea?

How well can you estimate 10 seconds? Investigate with our timing tool.

Aisha's division and subtraction calculations both gave the same answer! Can you find some more examples?

Play around with the Fibonacci sequence and discover some surprising results!