Yesterday I saw a fun tweet from my friend Kate Owens who is a math professor at the College of Charleston.
These problems from yesterday’s math contest looked like they would make a fun project, so had the boys work through the first 6 this morning.
Here’s problem #1 – this problem lets kids get in some nice arithmetic practice:
Here’s problem #2 – the challenge here is to turn a repeating decimal into a fraction:
Here’s problem #3 – this is a “last digit” problem and provides a nice opportunity to review some introductory ideas in number theory. The boys were a bit rusty on this topic, but did manage to work through the problem to the end:
Problem #4 is a neat problem about sums, so some good arithmetic practice and also a nice opportunity to remember some basic ideas about sums:
Next up is the classic math contest problem about finding the number of zeros at the end of a large factorial. My older son knew how to solve this problem quickly, so I let my younger son puzzle through it. The ideas in this problem are really nice introductory ideas about prime numbers:
The last problem gave the boys some trouble. BUT, by happy coincidence I’m about to start covering partial fractions with my older son, so the timing for this problem was lucky. It was interesting to see the approach they took initially. When they were stuck I had the spend some time thinking about what was making the problem difficult for them.
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