Saw this tweet from Alexander Bogomolny yesterday and knew immediately what today’s project was going to be 🙂
The problem is, I think, accessible to kids without much need for additional explanation, so I just dove right in this morning to see how things would go.
My first question to them was to come up with a few thoughts about the problem and some possible strategies that you might need to solve it. They had some good intuition:
Next we attempted to use some of the ideas from the last video to begin to study the problem. Pretty quickly they saw that the initial strategy they chose got complicated, and a more direct approach wasn’t actually all that complicated:
I intended to have them solve the 4x4x4 problem with one of our Rubik’s cubes as a prop, but we could only find our 5x5x5 cube. So, we skipped the 4x4x4 case, solved the 5x5x5 case and then jumped to the NxNxN case:
Finally, I wanted the boys to see the “slick” solution to this problem – which is really cool. You’ll hear my younger son say “that’s neat” if you listen carefully 🙂
Definitely a fun problem – would be really neat to share this one with a room foll of kids to see all of the different strategies they might try.
Mike's Math Page 