This activity encourages pupils to apply systematic listing strategies to ensure thay have found all of the ways of colouring the sweets and have not missed any out. As an extension pupils could investigate the general rule for finding the number of different sweets that could be decorated if there were n different colours to choose from and each sweet had m stripes.
There are solutions to each level of this puzzle showing systematic ways of colouring the sweets but they are only available to those who have a Transum Subscription.
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Transum,
Monday, January 5, 2015
"A time-honoured way of learning how to do this type of activity is by first using building blocks such as Multilink or Lego. For example, using bricks of two different colours how many three brick towers can you build? Because the towers can be easily moved around it is possible to put them into order to spot duplicates or missing towers. The order could be determined by how many of each coloured brick are in each tower. It is understanding that there can be order to this task that makes it easier to do."