Mathematics

Mathematics – Problem Solving

Blackburn High School has been fortunate in engaging the support of the Education Faculty at Monash University. Dr. Karina Wilkie from Monash has been working with the Mathematics Department at Blackburn on ‘Intriguing Tasks’. The work Karina and her colleagues are engaged with at Monash deals with the pedagogy of problem-solving. Each of our Maths teachers has trialed two tasks this term, and we will be continuing this work into next term.

The two tasks we have trialed are shown below. We encourage parents to try these tasks yourselves and engage with your children about how they solved it in class. Some of the students’ solutions were quite brilliant!

Task #1 – How many triangles?

Task #2 – Cups

Maria has 3 containers – a three-cup, a nine-cup, and a twenty-cup container. None of the containers have any markings on them.

Using these 3 containers, Maria can make up various volumes of liquid. Is Maria able to make up all quantities from 1 to 20 inclusive?