Spice up your lessons with maths magic and puzzles!

Abstract

Getting students excited about learning is the teachers' constant challenge. The answer lies in incorporating creative techniques into our classroom practice. Spicing up our lessons with some maths magic and puzzles could easily help increase attention, understanding and retention significantly. Appropriate recreational problems stimulate intellectual curiosity, develop problem solving skills, promote discovery and thinking skills, as well as unleash creativity. These problems appear to be recreational or magical in nature but they are actually based on sound mathematical concepts. In solving these problems, students actively participate in discovering or deciphering the hidden principles underlying each problem and in the process construct their own knowledge of mathematics. This presentation also stress on the need for excitement to encourage mathematical thinking. Mathematical magic can serve as an effective means of motivation at almost all levels of instruction. The major purpose of its use in the classroom is to enable students to discover that mathematics is easy and interesting, and thus stimulate interest in their further study of mathematics.