Working systematically

Basic strategy games are particularly suitable as starting points for investigations. Players instinctively try to discover a winning strategy, and usually the best way to do this is to analyse the outcomes of series of 'moves'. With a little encouragement from the teacher, a mathematical investigation is born.

Find out about Magic Squares in this article written for students. Why are they magic?!

A Latin square of order n is an array of n symbols in which each symbol occurs exactly once in each row and exactly once in each column.

This is about a fiendishly difficult jigsaw and how to solve it using a computer program.