Maths week took place last September on Monday 14th, 2019. The 5th and 6th class were involved in three events. The first event was run by Douglas Buchanan, the second event was run by Shane Dowdall and the final event was run by David O’Keefe and Caroline Sheedy. All the events were great fun. Here is one of the maths problems Doug did with us:

An old man died and left all his camels to his three children. In his will he requested that half of his camels went to his eldest child, a quarter of his camels went to his middle child and a sixth of his camels went to his youngest child. However, when they counted his camels they found he had eleven…What can they do?

Doug made solving this problem fun by involving the class in the problem. He placed a picture of a camel on eleven students. He placed a picture of the eldest, middle and youngest child on 3 more students. He then placed a picture of an old man on another student and finally a picture of a ‘stinky camel’ on one more student. He then showed us how the old man with his stinky camel could help solve the problem…

The old man said, why don’t you borrow my stinky camel and add him to your herd. Now, the problem can be easily solved…because now there are twelve camels and half of the herd is 6 camels, a quarter of the herd is 3 camels and a sixth of the herd is 2 camels. The old man then pointed out that the problem has been solved and the stinky camel wasn’t given to a child because [6 camels + 3 camels + 2 camels = 11 camels] so the stinky camel can be given back to the old man!

There was lots of other stuff shown to us during maths week. I wish I could tell you everything but there’s too much. So I will just give you the highlights:

Shane Dowdall did a few maths tricks and then introduced us to how you might go about solving a problem like the “Buildings Puzzle”. These problems are a bit like Sudoku in that you are required to place the numbers 1 to 4 in each of the rows and columns of a grid. However, here the numbers written in the grid represent the heights of buildings (1 is the shortest building, 2 is the second shortest etc). The numbers written on the outside of the grid represent the number of buildings you can see if you were looking down the grid from that place. Here are a couple of problems for you to tackle:

David O’Keefe and Caroline Sheedy came in and did activities involving symmetry and braille with us. For the symmetry part we got a piece of paper and wrote a word backwards. Then, with the mirrors they gave us we held them to the side of the piece of paper and we were then able to read the word the right way around!! We then traced and punctured small holes in each letter of the word we’d just written with a pin. After we were done we were all given blind masks. Then the person would have to first look at the backwards word and try guess it the right way around and secondly put on the blind mask and feel each bump on the letters and at the end guess the word.

Most people would say maths is boring but it’s not. Seeing maths in a different way was great and showed me that maths isn’t all just work, work, work – it can be fun too!! We really enjoyed all the maths shown to us during maths week. The 5th Class can’t wait until next year and although 6th Class will be gone we will be hoping that Maths Week in Secondary School will be just as much fun!

By Emilie – MarlBlog Committee