Playlist: Math
Valentine’s Day Codes
Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.
Contig
Roll three dice and combine them using any mathematical operation. But be strategic to maximize your points!
Grouping Shapes by Parallel and Perpendicular Sides
Which shapes go together based on parallel and perpendicular lines?
Letters With Symmetry
Let’s group letters by their symmetry, then create symmetrical words, and then symmetrical sentences!
Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)
How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?
Polar Weather Report
The North Pole hits -40°. The South Pole hits -60°. Calculate the averages, graph the data, and deliver your polar weather report.
Math Curiosity: Magic Triangles
Can you make each side of this triangle add up to 9 using the digits 1-6?
Cooking In Space
Watch astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti cook a meal in zero gravity on the International Space Station.
Squiggles Collection 1
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
How Many Will There Be? Chip Off The Block
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Investigating Population Changes
How have the ages of three countries’ populations changed from 1950 to 2020? And what problems might that create?
Olympics: Medals by Population
Do big countries always have the most medals? Which smaller countries rank surprisingly high in the Olympics?
Olympics: Winter vs Summer Medal Count
Which country has a great balance between their summer and winter Olympic medals?
Racetrack – Race Around A Graph
How fast do you get your mathematical car going without crashing?
Mow A Lawn
How long would it take to mow a very large lawn with a push-mower?
Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game
Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?
Precipitation Tournament
Eight types of precipitation battle it out in this tournament.
Parabolic Curve Art
Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.
How Many Ways: Fraction Addition 234
How many different ways can you make this fraction addition statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: Fractions Multiply 2/3
How many different ways can you make this fraction multiplication statement true using only the digits one through nine?
Looping Grid Art
Pick a few numbers, draw some corresponding lines on grid paper, and you’ll end up with some interesting, looping math-y art!
Ultimate (or Inception) Tic Tac Toe
What if each square on a Tic-Tac-Toe board had another Tic-Tac-Toe board inside of it?
How Many Will There Be? Pyramids
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
How Many Will There Be? Desks
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
How Many Will There Be? Stairs
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
How Many Will There Be? Flowers
These flowers sure are getting bigger faster! How large will they be in step 10? What about step 50?
Cram
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!
Game: Number Scrabble
What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!
An Escher-Style Tessellation Project
Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!
Addition: 3 Digits Plus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit addition.
Subtraction: 3 Digits Minus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit subtraction.
Math Game: Heaps
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!
Math Curiosity: Klauber’s Triangle
In 1932, a leading authority on rattlesnakes, Laurence Klauber, discovered a startling pattern within a triangle of primes.
Math Curiosity: Ulam Spiral
What if we make a huge spiral of numbers and then highlight only the primes? Well, a bunch of weird patterns show up!
Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle
Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.
Math Curiosity: Goldbach’s Conjecture
Can any even number be written as the sum of two primes? Goldbach thought so, but we haven’t proven it… yet!
Evens and Odds – Addition and Subtraction
When we’re adding and subtracting, do evens make odds into evens? Do odds make evens odd? Which one has… more power!?
Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project
Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!
How Renewable Is That Resource?
Which resource is more renewable? And which is easier to find?
Parentheses: How big of a change can they make!?
Two tiny parentheses. One expression. How big of a change can they make? Bigger than you think.
How Many Ways: Fraction Equivalence
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: Times Equals Minus
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: Times Equals Times
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: 2 Digits ÷ 1 Digit = 1 Digit
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
Undoing Multiplication With Division
Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!
Exponents – How Low Can They Go?
Using exponent patterns, can students predict what the 0th power will be?
Calculators, Patterns, and Multiplying By Decimals
Before teaching students the procedure for multiplying with decimals, how much can they intuitively glean from a structured play session with calculators?
Math Curiosity: Four Squares
Every positive integer can be written as the sum of (at most) four perfect squares!
Math Curiosity: Magic Squares
Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!
Math Curiosity: The Coloring Problem
No video gets me more email from students! How few colors can you use to color in any map so that no two, neighboring regions are the same color?
Dots and Boxes
Who can make the most boxes from dots in this strategy game?
Why Is Our Calendar So Weird!?
Why are there 12 months? Why don’t weeks fit into months evenly? Why don’t weeks fit into the year evenly? What’s going on with the calendar!
The Angles of a Triangle
Why tell a kid the rules of a triangle when they can discover them!?
Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy
Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?
Finding The Volume of Laptops
How has the volume of laptops changed over time? You know you want to check out how huge those first versions were!
Math Curiosity: Odds & Squares
Why does the sum of the first 5 odds also equal 5 squared?
Doubling Dollars
Say you have a dollar. Say you can double that dollar each day: $1, $2, $4, and so on. How long will it take to reach… one million dollars? Not as long as you might think!
Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle
What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… forever!?
Fractals: Koch Snowflake
You could keep zooming in on this snowflake forever!
A Donut Investigation
In this cross-curricular investigation, students will look into an intriguing question: do donuts or salads have more sugar? They’ll grapple with misleading information, bias, and use their math skills to create a visual representation of sugar in popular foods.
Math Curiosity: Primes and Squares
Can any perfect square be written as the sum of two primes?
Math Curiosity: Legendre’s Conjecture
It seems like there’s always a prime number between two perfect squares… but is this always the case!?
Math Curiosity: Finding Primes
Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!
Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number
You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?
Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes
Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?
Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs
Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
The Game of 100
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?
Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture
The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…
Furnishing A Hotel
Design and furnish hotel rooms on a budget. Real math, real constraints, real decisions. Then pitch your hotel to investors.