Solve Me Puzzles - Play or Create Math Puzzles

Solve Me Puzzles is a free site provided by the nonprofit Education Development Center. The site offers free math puzzles for students to play and templates for teachers to use to create math puzzles.

Solve Me Puzzles features three basic puzzle types. The Who Am I? puzzles feature a little robot character that students identify by correctly solving word problems like "my value is even, my value is greater than six, my value is less than ten." The Mystery Grid puzzles have students slide numbers into a grid to correctly complete the patterns that are started in the grid presented to them. The Mobiles puzzles ask students to enter the correct values to balance a virtual mobile.

Applications for Education
All of the Solve Me Puzzles can be used as templates for creating your own puzzles. To create a puzzle simply choose "build" instead of "play" after you select a puzzle on the Solve Me Puzzles home screen. You will need to create an account on the site in order to save your work.

Plus Magazine - Math Puzzles and More

Plus Magazine is a free online publication dedicated to introducing readers to practical applications of mathematics. Plus Magazine strives to reach that goal through the publication of mathematics-related news articles, podcasts, and mathematics puzzles designed around "real-life" scenarios.

Applications for Education
Plus Magazine's mathematics puzzles provide students with challenges of varying difficulty. Most of the puzzles include some type of real-world scenario as a framework for the challenge. The puzzles could make excellent extra credit problems at the end of a mathematics test. 

Car Talk Puzzlers as Math Challenges

In the winter one of my weekend rituals is to listen to Car Talk while running errands in town. One of Car Talk's weekly features is the Car Talk Puzzler. The Puzzler is usually a math puzzler although some are language-based riddles too. As I was listening last week it hit me that the Car Talk Puzzlers could make great little classroom activities to get students thinking about math and language in a format that is a little different than standard textbook examples. Click here to access sixteen years of Puzzlers and their answers.

Plus Maths Challenging Mathematics Puzzles

Plus Magazine is a free online publication dedicated to introducing readers to practical applications of mathematics. Plus Magazine strives to reach that goal through the publication of mathematics-related news articles, podcasts, and mathematics puzzles designed around "real-life" scenarios.

Thanks to reader Christine Lenghaus for sending me the link to Plus Magazine in an email. 

Applications for Education
Plus Magazine's mathematics puzzles provide students with challenges of varying difficulty. Most of the puzzles include some type of real-world scenario as a framework for the challenge. The puzzles could make excellent extra credit problems at the end of a mathematics test.

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