up and down staircase
By Lucy,Jack and Sonny.
First we read the instructions to help us no what we needed to do to solve the problem. So we figure out we needed to draw on a whiteboard or use multi-link and build a pyramid because the question said find out how many blocks are in the pyramid with five steps up and down. The best and clearest way is probably to use multi-link in our opinion.
Nine blocks should be in line with each other at the bottom of the pyramid. Now we built the rest of pyramid with five steps up and five steps down, all the blocks should be in line with each other one on top of each other.
Once you have done that count all the blocks inside the pyramid and your answer should come to twenty five (25). After that we tried to do seven and ten to see if their was a trick then we found out if you look closely and think about you answers you will notice a trick, and the trick is however many blocks is on one side of the pyramid you times that by itself this trick is called square numbers. This happens on every number you use but the trick only works when you use one side of the pyramid and only times that number by itself.
Now try and do seven blocks up and down the staircase in your mind and if you get the answer of 49 you would now know a quicker way to work out the staircase process. We found out the trick because we did one block up and down then two blocks then five by then we could see a pattern so we tried ten and it worked so that is are explanation on how we figured out this problem.