I had a couple of great conversations about geometry and problem solving with my older son today. It started this morning with an awesome problem from the 2009 AMC 10:
It continued tonight with a really cool challenge problem about a 7 pointed star from our geometry book. It was so great when my son suddenly saw how to solve the problem in general. Unfortunately, the memory in my camera had filled up and I didn’t notice that we’d stopped recording. Groan.
First part of conversation here – where he reduces the problem to a simple case to check and see what happens:
First ~2 minutes or so of the second part of the conversation. The beginnings of the general idea are nearly there. I want to be so mad at my camera . . . .
Mike's Math Page 