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Best wishes for August wherever you may be. I am in the UK and am about to catch a train for Glasgow, a city I’ll be visiting for the first time. The record heat wave in the UK has come to an end and today water is falling from the clouds. I think it is called rain but it has been so long since I saw it that I can’t be sure. Let’s start with a rainy-day puzzle:
Three thousand eight hundred and sixteen is delightfully divisible. The first digit is, of course, divisible by one. The number formed by the first two digits, 38, is divisible by two. The number formed by the first three digits, 381, is divisible by three and the number formed by the first four digits, 3816, is divisible by four.
Can you increase the list of digits to make a nine-digit number which is also delightfully divisible? Your answer should be a pandigital number containing all of the digits one to nine. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.
Talking of Pandigital Numbers, I have just uploaded a brand-new, two-level, self-marking quiz about them which touches on divisibility and, to a lesser extent, place value.
Other activities created in July are based on the ‘arranging the digits 1 to 9’ idea and provide a great environment in which to develop problem-solving strategies. For some the difficulty of the puzzle builds over a number of levels providing a low threshold, high ceiling learning activity. Try them for yourself and please let me have any feedback. They are Multitude, Double Treble and Triside Totals.
Sixteen other Transum activities were updated during last month as part of the Forth Bridge style cycle of keeping all of the content on the website fresh, easy to access and relevant to mathematics learning today. I am always happy to receive comments and suggestions and particularly ideas for new content.
You have probably heard the debate about summer learning loss. Research indicates that by the end of the long summer holidays, pupils perform on average, one month behind where they left off in the spring. It’s not too late to send an email to your pupils with suggestions of Maths activities they can do during the down time. I have put together a list of easy-to-assign activities covering a wide range of topics on the Holiday Activities page. Please let me know if you have any other ideas.
Don’t forget that if ever Transum.org goes offline you can always find the activity you need on one of the mirror sites: Transum.com and Transum.info.
The answer to this month’s puzzle is 381,654,729. Did you enjoy working it out? Would it be a worthwhile challenge for your pupils? Go to the Delightfully Divisible page for an interactive workspace and a link to a list of divisibility tests. Depending on your pupil’s abilities (and the time of day) you may decide to give them a clue as I did to you.
That’s all for now, enjoy the month of August,
John
PS: Why is a dog with a bad foot like adding 6 and 7?
A. Because he puts down three and carries the one.
Do you have any comments? It is always useful to receive feedback on this newsletter and the resources on this website so that they can be made even more useful for those learning Mathematics anywhere in the world. Click here to enter your comments.
