Or search by topic
This task develops spatial reasoning skills. By framing and asking questions a member of the team has to find out what mathematical object they have chosen.
Jo made a cube from some smaller cubes, painted some of the faces of the large cube, and then took it apart again. 45 small cubes had no paint on them at all. How many small cubes did Jo use?
Stick some cubes together to make a cuboid. Find two of the angles by as many different methods as you can devise.
A spider is sitting in the middle of one of the smallest walls in a room and a fly is resting beside the window. What is the shortest distance the spider would have to crawl to catch the fly?
Imagine a large cube made from small red cubes being dropped into a pot of yellow paint. How many of the small cubes will have yellow paint on their faces?
How many winning lines can you make in a three-dimensional version of noughts and crosses?
Can you use small coloured cubes to make a 3 by 3 by 3 cube so that each face of the bigger cube contains one of each colour?
Which faces are opposite each other when this net is folded into a cube?
A task which depends on members of the group working collaboratively to reach a single goal.
A task which depends on members of the group working collaboratively to reach a single goal.
Discover a way to sum square numbers by building cuboids from small cubes. Can you picture how the sequence will grow?
This problem provides training in visualisation and representation of 3D shapes. You will need to imagine rotating cubes, squashing cubes and even superimposing cubes!
In this problem we see how many pieces we can cut a cube of cheese into using a limited number of slices. How many pieces will you be able to make?
A description of how to make the five Platonic solids out of paper.
The net of a cube is to be cut from a sheet of card 100 cm square. What is the maximum volume cube that can be made from a single piece of card?
There are 27 small cubes in a 3 x 3 x 3 cube, 54 faces being visible at any one time. Is it possible to reorganise these cubes so that by dipping the large cube into a pot of paint three times you can colour every face of all of the smaller cubes?
A ribbon runs around a box so that it makes a complete loop with two parallel pieces of ribbon on the top. How long will the ribbon be?
Toni Beardon has chosen this article introducing a rich area for practical exploration and discovery in 3D geometry
Which of the following cubes can be made from these nets?
What is the surface area of the tetrahedron with one vertex at O the vertex of a unit cube and the other vertices at the centres of the faces of the cube not containing O?
P is the midpoint of an edge of a cube and Q divides another edge in the ratio 1 to 4. Find the ratio of the volumes of the two pieces of the cube cut by a plane through PQ and a vertex.
A box of size a cm by b cm by c cm is to be wrapped with a square piece of wrapping paper. Without cutting the paper what is the smallest square this can be?