Blog

Difficulty: Fun The extension is finished! Five new classrooms have been added to the main building. But there’s a problem. The corridor to the new classrooms is very busy. When the bell goes, lots of students stream out of the extension, while others rush in. It gets really crowded!

Difficulty: Tricky Dolly bought a special cheese. It comes in a square block that’s 5 centimetres wide, 5 centimetres deep and 5 centimetres tall. It’s also coated in wax on all sides. Without removing the wax, Dolly cuts the cheese into 1 centimetre cubes. Can you work out how many cubes have wax on them?

Difficulty: Fun Ash and Stacy Brull have five daughters. Each of their daughters has one brother. How many people are there in the Brull family?

Difficulty: Taxing Water engineers want to empty a dam to do repairs. There’s a creek running into the dam, which will keep filling the dam, unless they install pumps to empty that water. Each pump could empty a swimming pool in a week.

Difficulty: Fun Aoi is a very consistent origami artist. It takes her two minutes and 23 seconds to fold one crane. Without using a calculator, or even a pen and paper, can you work out how long it will take her to fold 60 cranes?

Difficulty: Fun Tommy’s part of a group that’s out breaking the rules. They’re going for a ride together instead of social distancing. Each member is on their own vehicle. Some of them are riding bikes and some are riding trikes, with three wheels instead of two. If there are 22 riders and 47 wheels, how […]

Difficulty: Taxing Gillian is running the lights for a big musical. The spotlight has a rotating circle of six frames that she puts filters (like cellophane) in, allowing her to change the light’s colour.

Moein is messing about with some pieces of graph paper. He’s cut out some rectangles, and he’s ruling a line from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of each piece of paper. Then he plans to count the number of squares that each diagonal goes through.

Difficulty: Tricky Dennis and Richard went on a tour of a chocolate factory. At the end of the tour, they went to the reject room, where the tour guide gave Dennis a strange block of chocolate.

Difficulty: Tricky Chloe is researching kiwifruit. Kiwi plants are unusual compared to many plants, as they’re either male or female. To make a kiwifruit, you need pollen from a male plant to fertilise a flower on a female plant.