Shikaku - a great game to investigate areas of rectangles. Online flash or iOS app! Is this the new sudoku?

 

I recently read this post over at Mathing... about Shikaku. Being the Christmas holiday break, i like to have a few puzzles to do while relaxing. I love this new game.

 

Rules:

• Each number must appear in one and only one rectangle.
• You must use enough rectangles to fill the playing board.
• The number in a rectangle is the area of the rectangle (or number of squares that it takes up). E.g. a 10 could be in a 1x10 or 2x5 rectangle.

 

You can go to this flash site to play online, but given that I am using my iPad more than a desktop these days (a non flash friendly device) I had to search for an iOS app and have come up with the following free app: Shikaku that has about 20 free puzzles. There are also some additional puzzles, they come at a price of 50 for $2.99 e.g. Shikaku #1

 

Application to Teaching This would be an excellent activity to investigate areas of rectangles with a Year 7 class. You could also look at potential links between area and perimeter. Students could come up with their own modified game where numbers represent perimeters.

 

Sunday, 11 December 2011

Microsoft Word plays friendly with inking again - here's my fix to 'delete all ink'.

When Microsoft launched Office 2010, they destroyed inking in Word. I use a Toshiba Tablet PC (a must for any mathematics teacher!)

It allows me to create my worksheets (topic-based booklets) in word and then write directly on the screen with my toshiba supplied pen. I turn the pen over and it is an eraser (like an old fashion pencil) -- this ease of erasing was broken in the initial release of 2010, but now it's fixed!

Now there's just the problem of not being able to delete all the ink in a document. Thankfully there is a fix for this problem to get that button back. Just watch the short video below.