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Puzzle
Puzzles to Exercise the Brain
Last Updated Aug 20, 2008 07:11 AM
Do your students' brains seem a little lazy lately? Energize them with some brainteasers -- problems and puzzles that will get those neurons sparking and get the blood flowing to the head. Included: Additional puzzle resources for kids of all ages!
New research indicates that exercising the brain stimulates its growth and working efficiency. This week, Education World surveys some of the best puzzle sources on the Internet. We introduce each site and tell a little about it. Then we offer sample puzzles for you to share with your students.
If you're looking for puzzles for very young students, you'll find those in the Additional Puzzle Resources section at the end of this story.
What are you waiting for? Go ahead! One of these workouts ought to keep the brains in your class in tip-top shape. You can check students' answers in the Answer Key. Then visit the best puzzling sites on the Internet to find even more brain-busting challenges for your students!
WORK IT OUT!
Brain Teasers
The Brain Teasers site, from Houghton Mifflin, provides new brainteasers each week and posts solutions the following week. Choose a puzzle appropriate for students in grades 3 and 4, 5 and 6, or 7 and up and select This Week's Question, Last Week's Question, or the Archives. If you're stuck for an answer, click the magnifying glass for a hint. If you're really stuck, you can click the light bulb for the solution. The Mystery Number puzzle below is from the Grades 5 and 6 Archive. 1. I am a four-digit number with no two digits the same. My ones digit is twice my thousands digit and one less than my tens digit. My hundreds digit is the difference between my tens digit and my thousands digit. My thousands digit is an odd number less than 6. What number am I?
Brainbinders.com
Not all brain puzzles require reading. Try this origami puzzle, for example. To solve the puzzle, print Puzzle 2002 from the Brainbinders.com site (reduced-size sample below), cut it out, and make two folds so that you end with a solid color on each side. You'll find 50 different puzzles at Brainbinders.com. This one is one of the easiest. Others require two, three, four, or five folds to solve.
2. Make two folds so each side of the folded puzzle is a solid color.
Brain Teasers: The Ultimate Puzzle Site
Take your students' brains on a "power walk" to this site. There you'll find hundreds of brainteasers like the one below. Be careful about directing students to this site, however, if you want to keep them out of the arcade.
3. A camel has 3,000 bananas. The animal wants to travel a 1,000-mile stretch of desert. It has to eat one banana for each mile it walks. The camel can carry only 1,000 bananas at a time. The camel's family waits on the other side of the desert. The camel wants to find a way to take as many bananas to the family as possible. Hint: The camel doesn't have to go all the way at once and can leave bananas in the desert because the camel and its family are the only camels that eat bananas. Can the camel take any extra bananas? If so, how many?
Brain Teasers from Pick Your Brain!
Are your students ready for a real workout? Then have them try the puzzle below. You'll find it and 11 other brainteasers at Brain Teasers from Pick Your Brain, a student project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
4. A woman is reading a book. Each day, she reads half of the remaining book. The book has 348 pages. How many days will it take her to finish the book?
Serendip Brain and Behavior
The Prisoners' Dilemma puzzle (below) is just one of the interactive activities at Serendip Brain and Behavior. Your students might also try Pattern Detection and Serendipity, Blindsight: Seeing What You Don't See, Seeing More than Your Eye Does, and others. Many of the puzzles at this site require the Java plug-in.
5. A fiendish cyberspace wizard has locked you and Serendip into a diabolical game. On each turn of the game, you each must choose, without knowing the other's choice, between cooperating with each other and trying to take advantage of each other. Following every turn of the game, you will each receive a certain number of gold coins, depending on the choices you made. If you both decide to cooperate, you will each receive three gold coins. If one of you decides to cooperate but the other chooses competition, the competitor will receive five gold coins and the cooperator none. If you both decide to compete, each will receive a single gold coin. Your chances of surviving are closely related to the average number of coins you have. If the average drops below a critical number (chosen in an unknown way by the wizard), a foul fate will befall you. Since neither of you knows the critical number, neither of you has any choice but to try, on each and every turn, to maximize your own income. Can you find a successful strategy? See also Puzzle 371 1 - 6 |
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Whereas the word 'solitaire game' in context with a game originally simply meant that a game is designed to be played by one player only, the game 'solitaire', especially peg solitaire is such an old game that the word 'solitaire' has become closely associated with this special game.
Games that are similar to peg solitaire are therefore called solitaire-type puzzles.
'Solitaire-type puzzles' typically consist... The rec.puzzles archive
The rec.puzzles archive offers many classic mind-benders, categorized by subject area. Among the two dozen subject areas you'll find are analogies, cryptograms, language puzzles, logic puzzles, problems of probability, riddles, and trivia puzzles. You might want to preview this site, however. Students will love it, but some of the oldies are a little bloody. Three sample puzzles appear below.
6. Bear (a geometry p... Tiling puzzles use two-dimensional shapes that have to be assembled into a larger given shape without overlaps (and often without gaps). Some tiling puzzles ask you to dissect a given shape first and then rearrange the pieces into another shape. Other tiling puzzles ask you to dissect a given shape while fulfilling certain conditions. The two latter types of tiling puzzles are also called dissection puzzles.
... Computer puzzle game is a genre of computer games that emphasize puzzle solving. The types of puzzles involved can involve logic, strategy, pattern recognition, sequence solving, word completion or, in some cases, just pure luck.
Before there ever were video games (as we would recognise them) there were jigsaw puzzles and the Rubik's Cube, today's puzzle game forefathers. The genre can be difficult to describe: the gameplay is usually abstract (but not always) often involving arranging geometric shapes to fulfil some goal or constraint. Often edge matching or colour matching plays an important role. Puzzle games usually strive to have a pic... Transport puzzles are logistical puzzles, which represent real-life transport problems.
Description
As in shuffling puzzles, no piece is ever lost or added to the board. In contrast to shuffling puzzles, however, in transport puzzles all tokens have to follow certain routes given on the board; they cannot be lifted off the board and placed on faraway positions that have no visible connection to the from-position. Hence transport puzzles often mean that the player... The eight queens puzzle is the problem of putting eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard such that none of them is able to capture any other using the standard chess queen's moves. (Piece colour is ignored, and any piece is assumed to be able to attack any other). That is to say, no two queens should share the same row, column, or diagonal. This is an example of an n queens puzzle for placing n queens on an n×n chessboard.
Trivial solution method
There is a simple method... A puzzle is a problem or enigma presented as entertainment; that is written down, acted out, etc.
Many puzzles stem from serious mathematical or logistical problems (see packing problems and tour puzzles). Others, like chess problems, are derived from board games. Others again have been devised for the sole purpose of being brain teasers.
The history of puzzles goes back many thousand years, Tangram being one of the earliest and sti... |
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