Yesterday we watched the “tie folding” part of James Tanton’s latest video:
The video led to a great project with the boys last night:
James Tanton’s tie folding problem
The boys knew from the video that the method could also be applied to sharing candy. Since we didn’t watch that part of the video I was wondering if the boys could figure out the connection on their own. Here’s the start:
Next we tried an example to see what would happen if our initial guess was a big over estimate of 1/3 of the Skittles:
Since we were struggling with our second time through the procedure in the last video, I thought it would be fun to try to be more precise in how we split the piles. That extra precision did lead to slightly better results.
So, a really nice math activity. It was really fun to see the procedure work when we couldn’t be totally sure we were actually dividing the piles in half. Such a great project for kids.
Mike's Math Page 