Sweets in a box
Sweets in a Box printable sheet
A sweet manufacturer has decided to design some gift boxes for a new kind of sweet.
Each box is to contain 36 sweets placed in lines in a single layer in a geometric shape without gaps or fillers.
How many different shaped boxes can you design?
The sweets come in 4 colours, 9 of each colour.
Arrange the sweets so that no sweets of the same colour are adjacent to (that is 'next to') each other in any direction. In the picture below, none of the squares marked x can have a red sweet in them.
Arrange the sweets in some of the boxes you have drawn.
Now try making boxes of 36 sweets in 2, 3 or 4 layers.
Can you arrange the sweets, 9 each of 4 colours, so that none of the same colour are on top of each other as well as not adjacent to each other in any direction?
See if you can invent a good way of showing your arrangement.
Try different numbers of sweets such as 24 or 60 in each box.
How many different rectangular-shaped boxes can you make using $36$ squares?
Could you make boxes in any other shape?
Gabe and Zoran from Mrs. Hovish's Math Class from the Athena Academy in the United States
At first we were confused so we started by placing beads in random places. Then we started moving the "candies" around so that they would follow the rules. Then we started seeing a pattern! We noticed that the same 2 colors were always in a row together so we just finished by following that. I ended up with 6 rows and 6 columns. Gabe had 4 rows and 9 columns. We used a multiplication chart and saw that 6X6 = 36 and 9X4= 36 too! Here are their pictures.
Tamara, Ellie and Izzy, Lily and Isabelle from St. Andrew's, Enfield sent in these three solutions.
Shriya from the International School in Frankfurt Germany sent in these three excellent different designs.
Lily and Isabelle from St.Michaels School sent in this solution:
Well these were really good solutions, well done everyone.