Maths Scavenger Hunt

An Outdoor Activity

Leaves

Collect as many of the following items as possible. Each item will be awarded a mark out of ten for its quality or the ingenuity involved in finding it.

  ITEM SCORE
A twig exactly 12 inches long
Five pebbles, together weighing exactly a pound
A pendulum which swings an exact second
A natural spiral
A perfectly symmetric leaf
An item with rotational symmetry
A perfect equilateral triangle, made from natural materials, laid out on the ground, each side at least 2m long
Two congruent shapes
Two similar shapes
A green blade
Find two trees exactly 5m apart
Work out the direction of the sun from this place
A natural fractal, length exactly twice the width
Something never been seen before
A Fibonacci number in nature
Fir cone, 5cm long
  Total

Comments and Suggestions

Transum,

Thursday, May 8, 2008

"This is a fine activity for a hot sunny afternoon in a park with trees. Print out one copy of the list above for each pair of children. If the children are quite young ensure that there is plenty of teacher supervision and clearly state the boundary of the game area. Have a clear way to end the game such as a time limit signified by a blast of a whistle that can be clearly heard across the playing area.
At the end of the game each pair can be marked out of ten for each object they have found and how imaginative they have been."

Transum,

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

"A second method of playing the Scavenger Hunt game is related to the supply and demand concept. Project the list above and in the ‘Score’ column record a number which represents how much the teams will be paid (in play money) for producing the relevant item on the list. The teacher can vary these prices as the game progresses so that items that some teams have already found can go down in price while those that no team has yet found can increase in price. This does require the teams to bring in items to the teacher base as soon as they have found them and be paid accordingly."

Mount School York, Twitter

Friday, June 29, 2018

Transum,

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

"My favourite is ‘Something never been seen before’. You could also add ‘Something that will never be seen again’. Pupils are bound to come up with creative solutions to these two but the standard is to take an apple, cut it in half and show the inside as 'Something never been seen before'. You then eat the apple so that it is 'Something that will never be seen again'."

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An online version of this activity is available at www.transum.org/go/?to=Scavenge