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Welcome to the April 2015 edition of the Transum Mathematics Newsletter. Did you start the month off with the April Fool’s Starter? Did your pupils fall for it?
Your puzzle for this month is about a game called Best Dice in which two people roll a dice and whoever gets the higher number wins. A prize is awarded to the person winning most times after 100 games. The catch is the dice don’t have the numbers one to six on their faces.
There are four different dice and you are allowed to choose which dice you will play with.
Which dice would you choose to give you the best chance of winning the prize? The answer can be found at the end of this newsletter.
There have been many pages added and updated during this last month. A new puzzle called Numskull is designed to provide a relaxing logic challenge where the mathematics involved is suitable for upper Primary pupils. There are five levels differing by the number of clues available.
For older students a Number Systems Venn Diagrams activity provides a quick but effective revision task. The objective is to drag the numbers in to the correct layer of the concentric circles. The software checks the correctness of the placings.
Also for older students is a rapidly growing database of Exam-Type Questions and their worked solutions. There are currently 90 questions and answers in the database but more are being added regularly. They are similar to questions that have appeared on IB Standard, Maths Studies and GCSE examinations but have all had the wording and numbers changed to make them different to past-paper questions you may find elsewhere. The solutions can be revealed line by line making a great teaching tool for the classroom.
Though not specifically mathematical a Scheduling puzzle has been added to provide a little more variety to the Transum Puzzles page. It’s not too difficult and the software shows you which criteria you have and have not fulfilled when you choose to check your solution. I’d love to know if you decide to use it with your pupils.
I'm not sure how we managed so long with out a traditional fractions, decimals and percentages conversion activity on the Transum website. Now there’s a Starter, an interactive pupil activity and a revision presentation on this important topic.
The answer to the puzzle posed at the beginning of this newsletter is a bit like rock, paper, scissors. Whichever dice you choose, your opponent could always pick one of the remaining dice which has a better chance of beating you in the long term. Construct the possibility spaces for the possible dice pairings to see for yourself.
Blue beats red, red beats green, green beats yellow and yellow beats blue! You can see why in the answers section of the Best Dice Starter page.
Have a happy Easter, Songkran or whatever you may be celebrating in April.
John
PS. What do you call a saucepan of simmering soup on top of a mountain?
... A high-pot-in-use!
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