Fun

This week started for me with a very interesting phone call. It was from a gentleman from the United States looking for algebra based educational materials. I thought he must have the wrong number and forwarded him to Winthrop Australia (a Perth based computer firm associated with the University of WA)*. I thought that they would be able to assist due to their association with the university and education.

Anyhow, they sent him back to me and during the second call, I realized that the caller, Jim, was talking about my Friday Funny posts which sometimes included algebra problems! Once we had worked out the common ground, Jim and I had a long chat about Order of Operations and adding negative numbers. Jim is part of a Facebook group and often posts puzzles for the others to solve.

He found the same problems that I found. Many people don’t know about Order of Operations, or do know, but cannot implement them correctly or just cannot add negative numbers. For more information see: Answer: Only for genius ?? 3 – 3 x 6 + 2 = ??.

That phone call prompted me to find a new graphic algebra problem for you to solve….

Read more →

I believe that by now most of you should know that I love Lego. I have always had Lego in my life as a kid and also as an adult.

In recent years I have used Lego Mindstorms to design and build robots to help me be a better robotics mentor for the school my son’s went to.

Even though both my sons have left the school for university, I still mentor for the robotics club and am also on the Robocup Junior Australia Western Australia committee.

Read more →

After all the fun on Twitter after the last Friday Funny: Sporting Maths Puzzle, I have found another one to challenge you with.

This one also comes from the Book of Face and showed up because some of my friends had commented on it.

Now, I will not say whether their answers are correct or not because last time I missed something and so what I thought was the answer was incorrect initially.

Read more →

As usual, there is another mathematics and reasoning problem doing the rounds on the Book of Face. It showed up on my feed because some of my friends had responded on it.

Funnily enough a number of them commented with the incorrect answer. Looking at the other comments, there is a massive range of incorrect answers.

Read more →

After the amazing success of my series of articles on the last maths problem to go viral, I thought it was time for another.

If you did not see the last one, check out the links below. The first link has the question and the answer poll, the rest were trying to explain the solution:

• Trending: Only for genius ?? 3 – 3 x 6 + 2 = ??
• Answer: Only for genius ?? 3 – 3 x 6 + 2 = ??
• Conclusion: Only for genius ?? 3 – 3 x 6 + 2 = ??
• The Last Word: Only for genius ?? 3 – 3 x 6 + 2 = ??

I am still amazed that only 56% percent of the almost 4,000 people who responded on the previous problem got it right.

Read more →

When I as at school, I was one of those geeky boys that spent a lot of time in the school library. I actually worked as Library Assistant for a couple of years… I even still have the little badge to prove it. 🙂

Other the being able to play lots of games, it also meant that I could read lots of different magazines.

Read more →