A student in my 8th grade advanced class came back to visit as I was setting up my classroom this year. He was that "advanced" advanced kid. You know, the one who's probably smarter than you are? Well he seemed fairly bored the entire time I had him so I was shocked to hear mine had been his favorite class because of all the "Math Puzzles" we did. Of course, he probably was bored in class, but he did enjoy these logic problems!

So here are 30 of them. I've organized them into 6 sets. Each set has 5 problems, with 2 of the 5 being extensions of earlier ones from that set. You can use these in multiple ways: problem of the week, pick the ones that connect to your teaching, a break between units... I assigned them as a set for the month. I gave students 3 to pick from, and each week added an extension of one of the first 3 (like I have in my sets).

Or maybe just hand them out to the other math teachers at lunch and watch them try to resist tackling them. They really are quite fun and challenging.

I do have an answer sheet, but I should note that some of the questions can be interpreted in different ways, there's one I couldn't get (It might be impossible, explore!), and a couple that may have been able to be done in less steps. But that's just part of the fun with open-ended problems like these. Enjoy!

Charlie Boone


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.