median
don steward
mathematics teaching 10 ~ 16

Monday, 16 December 2019

find the shape puzzles

these are based on an idea by Naoki Inaba
he produced the 'area mazes' as well as many other puzzles
he appears to refer to these shape tasks as Zukei puzzles (42 of them)

there are translations into the English/American names for shapes, done by Sarah Carter (who introduced them to a wider audience via her Math = Love blog)
she posted her translation from Japanese on Sat Dec 17th, 2016
one version of these is here

for those with tablet/laptop availability, Desmos have an activity builder (tool) that can be used when looking for the shapes in the original (Naoki Inaba) tasks, here
students can either construct lines or draw freehand and these steps can be reversed, or erased

many thanks to all of the above people

for my versions, there almost certainly needs to be a presentation/reminder about how you know lengths are the same - using the same or rotated vectors (or by involving pythagoras)
and how you can tell that lines are parallel or perpendicular
this is highly likely to involve vectors (maybe calling it a journey between two points)

join four dots to make a shape, as specified for a particular row
other dots are there to create the puzzle
some of the shapes are tilted

I've tried to create puzzles that have just one solution but I may well have overlooked some options...
(please let me know via the email address, bottom right)

for my shapes, in this task I have chosen not to involve special examples of e.g. a parallelogram should be a general example rather than a rhombus, rectangle or square

a ppt is here





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