Teach17

A collection of hands-on puzzles, games and challenges to bring the maths department to life at the open morning. Pick a handful to run brilliantly rather than spreading thin across all of them.

1. Human knot or logic puzzle wall – a large physical puzzle, like a Rubik’s cube relay or tangram wall, visitors race the clock to solve.
2. Estimation station – a jar of sweets, a tank of marbles or a jug of coins visitors guess the number in, with the closest guess of the morning winning a prize.
3. Card trick with a mathematical secret – a simple trick that looks like magic but runs on modular arithmetic or binary, revealed once visitors are hooked.
4. Build a fractal – paper folding or a screen showing zoomable fractals, visitors building a simple Sierpinski triangle by hand out of paper or sweets.
5. Probability and games of chance – dice, spinners or a simple casino-style game visitors play a few rounds of, with a quick chat afterwards about why the house usually wins.
6. Code-breaking challenge – a short cipher visitors crack using frequency analysis or simple number substitution, similar to a real historical codebreaking task.
7. Optical illusion and impossible shapes – Escher-style prints and physical impossible triangles visitors can view from the one angle that makes them “work”.
8. Mental maths speed challenge – a buzzer-based quickfire round against a countdown clock, with a leaderboard for the fastest correct answers.
9. Golden ratio and nature – measuring tapes and real objects, shells, flowers, faces, so visitors check the golden ratio for themselves rather than just being told about it.
10. Build a geometric solid – nets and origami pieces visitors fold and assemble into 3D shapes like dodecahedra, taken home as a finished model.
11. Maths in art station – spirograph tools or symmetry drawing templates visitors use to create a pattern, showing geometry and art overlapping.
12. Maths trivia leaderboard – a live high score chart running all morning, giving people a reason to swing back past the stand and try to beat their score.
13. Student research and project showcase – posters or screens of the strongest student investigations, with the students themselves on hand to talk visitors through them.
14. Human graph or data station – visitors physically line up or place a sticker to build a live bar chart or scatter graph about themselves, like height or favourite subject.
15. Puzzle of the day board – a single tricky problem, like a river crossing puzzle or a logic grid, that changes through the morning with a box for written answers.
16. Careers wall with real pathways – actual alumni stories showing the route from GCSE or A-level maths into apprenticeships, degrees or jobs, ideally with a QR code linking to short video clips.
17. Build a bridge with shapes – spaghetti and marshmallow or card triangles visitors use to build the strongest possible structure, testing it with weights afterwards.