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Merry Christmas! Here’s our maths gift to you – a puzzle.

Have you ever got halfway through wrapping a present, and then run out of paper? Follow our foolproof method and discover the maths of gift wrapping!

Difficulty: Taxing I have a collection of strange dice.

Difficulty: Tricky Janet is afraid of the dark, especially dark caves and tunnels. Today Janet must catch the train into town. But there’s a problem. As soon as the train leaves the station, it goes into a tunnel.

Difficulty: Fun Sienna’s teacher is writing up a wicked problem on the board. First, the teacher writes all the numbers from 1 to 99. Then they erase 10, 20, and all the other numbers that end in 0. “Listen up!” the teacher announces. “I want you to multiply all the numbers on the board.

Imagine you’re at university, doing a maths quiz, with a calculator provided. The problem you’re tasked with reads, “Your grandmother was born in 1942, how old was she in 1994?” You think for a moment and realise it’s a subtraction problem. Into your calculator, you type “1994 – 1942”, and then triumphantly, you record the…

Difficulty: Fun Sergio is an electrician repairing a power line. There’s a stretch of eight, evenly spaced power poles he’s working on. The distance from the first to the fourth is 120 metres. What’s the distance from the first to the eighth pole?

Difficulty: Tricky I’ve got a square piece of paper, with lines for writing on both sides. Right now, the lines are running up and down the page. To get the lines running left and right, I could rotate the page, but that’s too boring. Can I do it by flipping the page instead?   Scroll…

Difficulty: Tricky Imogen has had enough of her goats getting into her veggie patch. She’s bought wire and poles, but before she starts building, she must work out what shape fence she needs.

Written by Gabrielle Tramby and Rachel Fitzgerald In this activity, you’ll turn a number into a necklace.