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Category: One Hundred Factorial

Gerry-mean-dering

A recent video from Howie Hua showed how if you split a collection of numbers into equal-sized groups, then find the mean of each group, then find the mean of those means, it turns out this final answer is the same as the mean of the original collection. He was careful to say it usually […]

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Making the lie true

We at my university regularly sell quite a big lie.
At Open Day and the Ingenuity STEM Showcase and any number of outreach activities, students do puzzles and play with construction toys and walk around with ropes and draw curves on balloons. Whether we say it explicitly or not, there is a message there that says: […]

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Introducing Digit Disguises with a small game

Because [reasons], my game Digit Disguises has been on my mind recently, and reading the original blog post from 2019, I suddenly realised I had never shared my ideas on how to introduce the game to a whole class at once. This blog post fixes that. To keep in the spirit of it, I have […]

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Running out of puzzles

Because people know I run the One Hundred Factorial puzzle sessions, they often ask me if I have a repository of puzzles they can use for their classroom, enrichment program, maths club, or their own enjoyment. Sometimes I feel embarrassed because I don’t actually have a big repository of puzzles. Surely since I am a person […]

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Quarter the Cross: Connect the Dots

This blog post is about a new variation on the classic Quarter the Cross problem, which I call Quarter the Cross: Connect the Dots.
Background
Here is the original Quarter the Cross problem:

To catch you up, here is everything I’ve written about Quarter the Cross up until now:

Quarter the Cross — in which I first learn about […]

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Changing the goal of the Numbers game

I conscripted the game Numbers and Letters seven years ago to help promote the Maths Learning Centre and the Writing Centre at university events like O’Week and Open Day. Ever since then, it has always bothered me how free and easy participation in the Letters game is, while the Numbers game is much less so. […]

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Number Neighbourhoods

This blog post is about a game I invented in February 2020, the third in a suite of Battleships-style games. (The previous two are Which Number Where and Digit Disguises.)
NUMBER NEIGHBOURHOODS: A game of analytic deduction
Players:

This game is for two players, or two teams.

Setting up:

Each player/team choose six different numbers between 0 and 10 (not including 0 […]

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Quarter the Cross: Colouring

Quarter the Cross is one of my favourite activities of all time, whether in maths or just life. I learned about it way back in 2015 and have been mildly or very obsessed with it ever since. You can read about my obsession in my first Quarter the Cross blog post, and you can read […]

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Which Number Where

Last year I invented a game called Digit Disguises and it has become a regular feature at One Hundred Factorial and other events. But before Digit Disguises came along, there was another game with a similar style of interaction that we played regularly, and this blog post is about that game. The game is called “Which […]

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The MLC Date Blocks

This blog post is about a piece of the MLC learning environment which is very special to me: the date blocks. It’s a set of nine blocks that can be arranged each day to spell out the day of the week, the day number, and the month. I love changing them when I set up […]

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