Week 2 Group 7: Lateral Solutions

I did my math circle with kids ranging in age from 6 to 9.

The second exercize, Answer Guessing, was the clear favorite. They kept wanting to come back to it between other things for the rest of the lesson. I thought they would figure this one out sooner than they did. They were amazed when I guessed the right answer using the example from the lesson plan and a few others I had written down beforehand. When the couldn't think how it was done, I did a few really simple examples such as "your number, plus five, minus your number. I predict your answer is 5!" After a couple of simple examples, they wanted to try it out on each other. Everyone who tried it used a formula adding two numbers such as "your number, plus ten, plus five, minus your number, equals 15!" They said they were excited to show this one to their parents that night. It probably would have been better to show them the problem written down rather than using the super-simple example, I just didn't think of it at the time. I think they probably would have come up with more complex formulas of their own, too, if they had been planning it out on paper instead of just keeping track of it in their heads- they might have tried throwing in some subtraction or even multiplication.

During the Squad of Soldiers activity, some of their ideas were "they told the kids to get out, and they went one by one," to which another kids responded, "yah, but how do you get the boat back?" "can a soldier and a child go in?" "Can the children be in the boat alone?" "Are there ropes?" "Are the soldiers all children?" "do they have super-fast shoes?" After the first kid solved the problem and explained it to the group, each other kid wanted to explain it out loud, too. I was surprised by that.

The Wolf, Goat, and Cabbage were the hardest for me, because the kids were slow finding the answer, and it was really uncomfortable for me to not give help. Some early ideas were "the man doesn't survive, and the wolf eats the goat," and, "if the goat is not fat, the wolf won't eat it." No one figured it out on their own, but they ended up talking through each step as a group until they got it. We used the colored counters to represent the cabbage, goat, and man.

Inverse tic-tac-toe was a little confusing, and I think we probably just didn't do it right. At first we played regular tic-tac-toe on whiteboards, and then tried to do inverse by erasing the marks that were there, but it was hard to keep track of which places you had erased because there wasn't anything there and they were keeping track in their heads, and so most kids started using their initials to mark the places they had erased, but then it wasn't inverse tic-tac-toe anymore because they were marking the squares, only there were old Xs and Os in the squares that didn't have initials in them yet. I probably should have done a practice game with someone before doing the math circle to figure out how to play it in a way that made sense. I felt this segment was kind of a mess. I just didn't know how to explain the procedure of how to play "inverse tic-tac-toe," so that might be helpful in the book.