What shapes can result from the following fold-and-cut process?
Take a piece of paper.
Fold it flat.
Make one complete straight cut.
Unfold the pieces.
Are all shapes possible?

If you start with some beans on a seesaw and you’re given certain additional beans to place on the seesaw, can you do it so the seesaw balances?

In this activity, students start by trying to solve various challenges involving different arrangements of beans on the seesaw and then design their own challenges. Next, they try to predict which arrangements will make the seesaw balance and which ones won’t (and why!).

The rules are simple: you want to place the sheep on the board so that the wolves can’t eat them. A wolf can eat a sheep if it has a direct path to it – or is in same row, column, or diagonal as that sheep. Can you place all your wolves and sheep on an nxn grid so all the sheep are safe?

For the Math Mind Reading Trick, you’ll need a volunteer who’s willing to have their mind read. The person performing the trick holds out the four cards and askes their volunteer to pick a number (whole numbers only, no fractions allowed!) between 1 and 15 and keep it a secret. Next, the mind-reader asks the volunteer if their number is on the cards one-by-one. The volunteer answers the questions with yes or no answers, and with some magic and a little math, the mind-reader figures out their number!

Students will explore a game between two players moving a chess Queen from place to place on a square grid. The Queen may move any number of spaces to the left, any number of spaces downward, and any number of spaces on the downward-left pointing diagonal. Each player takes turns using these moves. Whoever gets the Queen to the bottom-left square first wins!

Place our numbers into the cauldrons in ascending order – you can choose which cauldron each one goes in. However, if two numbers in one cauldron add up to a third number in that same cauldron, they bubble up and cause an explosion! This means that all the numbers, leave the cauldrons, and you must start all over again.

Our goal is to find the largest number we can place in our cauldrons without them exploding… do you think you’re up for this daunting task?

A prize is hidden behind one of three doors. You choose the door where you think the prize is hidden. But before the door is opened, one of the other 2 remaining doors is opened to reveal no prize. You can choose to keep the door you chose earlier or switch to the other remaining door. What should you do?

A town faces an epidemic of zombies! Luckily, the virus has just started to spread and the infected are able to stave off their hunger for human brains… for now. In fact, they’re willing to work alongside the remaining humans to help them get across a river to safety. Can you get all the humans and zombies across safely?

A local animal shelter has a puppies and kittens available for adoption that you just happen to be itching to own! In this week’s “paw-some” activity, two players begin with a certain number of animals to choose from and take turns adopting animals. The player to adopt the last animal wins! We’ll be constructing a strategy for beating this game and exploring a bit of sequences.