We were unpacking a bunch of books today and ran across James Tanton’s Solve This and Theoni Pappaas’s The Adventures of Penrose The Mathematical Cat. I asked the boys to find a problem they’d like to talk about and they found a gem from Tanton’s book: 16.1 A Fair Game? Peter has ten coins, Pennelope … Continue reading A probability problem from James Tanton’s “Solve This”
James Tanton’s Solve This book is full of incredible math projects to do with kids: Today we went back to do a project that we’ve looked at a few times before – cutting various versions of a Möbius Strip. We started with a cylinder just to get going with an easy shape: Next we moved … Continue reading Going back to James Tantons’ amazing Möbius Strip cutting project
This week I’m going to be giving a talk at the math camp at Williams college. The talk this year is going to be based on an amazing paper cutting project that I learned from James Tanton’s book Solve This: As that tweet from 2016 suggests, we’ve looked at these paper cutting ideas before: An … Continue reading Revisiting James Tanton’s paper cutting exercise
I didn’t have an specific project planned for today and was lucky enough to see a really neat problem posted by James Tanton: I didn’t show the tweet to the boys because I thought finding the patterns would be a good exercise for kids. We started with the k = 0 case. This case is … Continue reading Exploring a neat problem from James Tanton
Yesterday we looked at a really neat problem James Tanton posted last week: That project is here: Working through a challenging counting problem from James Tanton Our first look at the question involved some dice rolling and a computer simulation. Today we are going to look at an exact solution to the problem. That solution … Continue reading James Tanton’s counting problem part 2
Saw a really cool tweet from James Tanton today: Tonight I sat down with the boys to make sure they understood the problem. They noticed that half the numbers would have no powers of two – good start! After that observation they started down the path to solving the problem really quickly. In fact, my … Continue reading A nice problem about primes for kids from James Tanton
I was flipping through James Tanton’s Solve This last night and found a project I thought would be fun. I had no idea! We’ve done a few paper cutting projects before. For example: Cutting a double Mobius strip Tadashi Tokieda’s “World from a Seeht of Paper” lecture Our one cut project Fold and cut project … Continue reading An absolutely mind blowing project from James Tanton
Sow another super problem from James Tanton yesterday: Seemed like a great thing to talk through with the boys this morning. We started off with a quick overview of the problem, and both kids had really nice initial reactions. I was afraid that my older son’s idea had a lot of overlap with my younger … Continue reading A nice counting problem from James Tanton
Last summer James Tanton posted this problem on Twitter: That problem led to a super fun 3D printing project with the boys: James Tanton’s Geometry Problem and 3D Printing To my great (and wonderful) surprise, today my older son and I came across a similar problem from an old AMC 10: Problem #17 from the … Continue reading An old James Tanton-inspired 3d printing project pays off today!
The Mathematical Association of America recently posted this wonderful video from James Tanton about a problem on the 2003 AMC 10a. It is a fantasatic example of what solving math problems looks like: By lucky coincidence we had talked through this problem just a few days ago. My older son works on challenge problems … Continue reading A brilliant problem presentation from James Tanton
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