Math Brain Teasers

 

For warm-ups we tend to use problems students have already done, new problems to provide review, begin a 3 act task, or even use "What do you notice? What do you wander?" but what about using a brain teaser?  

Math brain teasers by definition encourage students to look at math in a different way. If the brain teaser is associated with the topic being taught, it provides a natural hook otherwise, it makes a great change of pace for the warmup.  

The nice thing about brain teasers is they require students to  use critical thinking skills, logic, and develop problem solving skills.  Furthermore, it helps improve reading and comprehension ability because they have to read brain teasers carefully and understand what information is needed.

In addition, brain teasers can help students feel a sense of accomplishment when they find the answer, improve memory and additional cognitive skills including the speed of processing done by the brain. Furthermore, brain teasers stimulate students to think quickly and critically while helping to increase student participation and engagement.  They also help students develop reasoning ability.

Brain teasers can be done as part of the warm-up, between activities to give students a break from instruction, a break for stimulating thinking, an exit ticket, or use it as a once a week thing.  

Brain teasers can be used to further math skills especially if it is presented as a riddle, puzzle or game.  You might couch a problem like "If 6 transforms into 13 and 14 transforms into 29, what does 15 transform into?"  This problem asks students to find the rule of 2x +1 where x is the original number.  2(6) + 1 = 13, 2(14) + 1 = 29 and 2(15) +1 = 31.

Another way is to create a trick question which has a play on words or a bit of a pun but requires extra attention.  One question might be "I am odd and if you remove one letter I am even. What number am I?"  The answer is a play on words so the number is 7 because seven is odd but when you remove the s you are left with the word "even".

The hard thing sometimes is finding brain teasers or riddles one can use in class so I've assembled a list of sites with ready to go material.

1. Steve Miller's Math Riddles is a website filled with a variety of riddles ranging from easy to hard and classified by topic. Some of the topics include combinatorics, geometry, algebra, probability, logic, even game theory.

2. Learn with math games has links to several different sets of brain teasers. Some of the brain teasers are visual while others are word problems and the few I did, I really enjoyed because the answers were not obvious but required a bit of thought.  They have one logic puzzle which asks "What month has 28 days?" A person's first instinct is to answer February but the actual answer is "All the months because they all have at least 28 days."

3. Prodigy Game has a list of at least 45 brain teasers made for kids but some are such they could be done by high schoolers because the reader is trying to follow a pattern rather than reading and understanding the problem.  I found myself jumping to the wrong answer.

4. Math Warehouse has a lovely set of brain teasers for students in the upper grades to high school. I found one riddle quite fun. "Two fathers and two sons sat down to eat eggs for breakfast.  They ate exactly three eggs, each person had an egg.  The riddle is for you to explain how?"  You can check the link for the answer if you aren't sure about the answer. 

If you want more, just type in "Math brain teasers for high school students" or the grade level you are interested in.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.