For most people, the challenge of a good puzzle is pretty compelling. Most of us happily absorb ourselves in games and brainteasers in which we have to solve a problem within given constraints.
The following ‘Area Maze Puzzles’ are the creations of Naoki Inaba, a Japanese puzzle-inventor who has been devising puzzles since he was a teenager. The beauty of these puzzles are that they fit neatly into a range of ‘Area and Perimeter’ related topics at the middle-school levels of the Maths Curriculum, as well as developing students’ ability to use deductive and logical reasoning in their maths.
Set some of these as a ‘game’ or ‘puzzle’ in your classroom and watch how quickly your students become absorbed in these terrific problem-solving geometry and measurement tasks. Start them off with solving these without the ‘no fractions or decimals’ rule; then give them some to solve by introducing this rule (ie, solve each problem using whole numbers only in their working).
Even better, if you really want to lift the lid off the ways in which your students attack problem solving, start a ‘mathematical learning conversation’ in your classroom on how different students tackle these puzzles and how they arrived at their solutions. You may be surprised at how many different ways in which your pupils think mathematically!
This is a great way of showing your class that maths is not just about ‘only one way which is the right way’, but rather, a subject that encourages different pathways of creative thinking about tasks and challenges!
