An excellent book for finding interesting maths challenges for students is Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities.  They can be used for setting tasks that combine areas of maths knowledge and they also highlight to students that maths questions aren’t solved in seconds but require devising strategies to solve them.  They are superb for developing deeper thinking skills.

One task in the book is called New Merology originally developed by Lee Sallows.  The interactive whiteboard resource here supports demonstrating this puzzle to students.    The challenge is to find a unique value for each of the letters in the spellings  of the words zero to twelve so  that when added up they equal the value of the word in which they are in.  So the number chosen for the letter “O” added to the number chosen for the letter “N” added to the letter chosen for the letter “E” must add up to 1.  Of course the letters appear in other words so by picking a value for “N” you also have an impact on the sum of the letters in “T+E+N”. 

The resource allows you to chose a letter then select its value by dragging the red marker across the top. If any of the values you have chosen are duplicated a warning will show.  The resource will also sum the values for each word.  While this resource could be used to aid in the solving of the problem a more effective use is to just use it to demonstrate the problem to the class and to use it to discuss different approaches to the problem as it avoids lengthy recalculations when a value is changed.  The student’s maths skills will be improved more if they work at the puzzle manually.  This puzzle will then give them a practical application for their skills in adding negative numbers as well as the deeper thinking skills involved.  A printable resource is also available below to give a structure to the puzzle.  It may be useful to laminate the print out so that students can use non-permanent markers to to write with and rub out as they change values.

The solution will not be included here as it is available in the book  Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities
and the intention here isn’t to take anything away from the book but rather support its use in the classroom.  The range of values used in the solution is from -7 to 11 as shown in the resource.

Go to interactive whiteboard resource.

Get printable resource.

Report any problems in the comments.  Also, do you find resources such as this interesting  or are the more usual teaching resources more useful?

A different Interactive Whiteboard resource to usual.  This one is similar to the alphabet books published on this site last year.  The text and pictures come from a book now in the public domain due to its age.  They’ve been put into an interactive book for class reading.  The morals for each fable are hidden by a label –  clicking it will remove the label.

To accompany this IWB resource is a printable version of the stories.  There is also a sheet that contains the morals.  This can be used as a class exercise where the students read the fables and match the most appropriate moral to it.

Click and drag the pages to turn them.  Please report any errors or typos in the comments section.

Go to interactive whiteboard resource.

Get printable resource.

As an additional function the outer red wheel can be freely spun by pulling quickly and releasing and this will spin the hands of the clock to a random time.  This function will be easier on an interactive whiteboard than with using a mouse.

EDIT: I have now added a clock for when you want to introduce roman numeral clocks. This one references the clock that often has the name of its bell extended to it, Big Ben. There is still a rotating bevel on this on and it works like the simple clock. The bevel is invisible unless you start to drag it.

NOTE:  A list minute change has introduced a bug into the rotation making the hand’s movement choppy.  This will be fixed today.  Fixed!

The image of the clock tower is courtesy of DAVID ILIFF and is used under a Wikipedia Commons license.

Please feedback on how useful you find this resource.

For standard IWB clock go to interactive whiteboard clock.

For roman numerals “Big Ben” clock go to interactive whiteboard clock.

 An interactive whiteboard resource to accompany a puzzle published in an old book by Henry Ernest Dudeney.  The puzzle is a useful one for teaching deeper mathematical thinking because while it can be solved by trial and error thinking about the maths behind it can make it much easier. 

The goal is to choose a number that all 4 sides of the frame can add up to and arrange the cards to do this.  Some numbers are possible some numbers are not.  This puzzle has been selected as it allows students of all abilities to have a go as the maths involved is not difficult.  The challenge should be to find a method of determining what numbers can be used as the common total amount and then how to make finding the layout much easier.  The resource provided here allows the puzzle to be demonstrated easily and can also allow whole class discussion of how to approach the problem.  Clicking on one card and then another causes them to swap places.  The resource totals the different lines automatically.  The original wording of the puzzle can be made to appear by clicking on the question mark button.

A printable sheet accompanies this resource which includes the original wording and diagram. It also includes the appropriate cards for cutting out to do the puzzle away from a computer.  If teachers would like the solution and maths behind it leave a comment with your email address in the box (it will not be published).  There will be at least a 5 day delay to ensure that students who have been set this as homework aren’t cheating by impersonating a teacher!

Go to interactive whiteboard resource.

Get printable resource.

A literacy focussed Interactive Whiteboard resource.  This resource is to be played at the IWB by students.  A common vowel combination is shown at the top of the screen and the student is challenged to make the longest word they can from the variety of letters shown on the given tiles. Non-scoring words such as those that do not contain the given vowels or are incorrect will result in points being taken away.  A four letter word will score 1, a five letter word 2, 6 letters will score 3 and  more than 6 will score 5.  Each game is timed with the time available  be set by the teacher.  There will always be at least a 4 letter word that is possible for each selection.

A high score facility has been suggested for some previous resources so has been incorporated into this resource for the current session.

This resource will take longer to load than others due to the size of the built in dictionary.  If any problems are found with the dictionary such as not recognising a common word please report it as well as any other errors you may encounter.  As ever the final error testing for this resource is in the hands of the users.

Go to Interactive Whiteboard Resource.

Teach the translation of shapes using this interactive whiteboard resource.  Click on one of the shape buttons to the right of the grid to display the corresponding shape in a random position.  A set of instructions for translating this shape will also appear in the blue box.  Drag and drop the four circular markers to the translated position of the shape’s corners.  If they are placed in the correct position the translated shape will be drawn on the screen.

The instruction box can be dragged to convenient locations on the screen.  The translating instructions can be set to words or vectors or both.

Please report any errors in the comments section.

Interactive whiteboard resource.

An interactive whiteboard resource to practise visualising clockwise and anticlockwise rotations.

When you click on “go” the clock face will be obscured.  When it is shown again the numbers will be hidden.  The blue box at the side tells you how many degrees the clockface has been rotated by and whether the rotation was clockwise or anticlockwise.

The rotations are always in multiples of 3o degrees. Clicking “show” will reveal the clock’s numbers and the answer.  This would probably be useful as a plenary activityafter a lesson on rotation.

Any comments are welcome as are error reports and suggestions for improvement.

Interactive whiteboard resource.

If you are looking for a traditional interactive whiteboard clock for lessons on telling the time go to: interactive whiteboard clock on this site.