If you’re looking for an activity that can replace some boring sections in your math book, here’s a great one! Students will not only work intently for long periods of time, they will want to learn even more advanced operations such as exponents, roots, and factorials. Classes and groups of students will be challenged to work together to explore and complete this task. Students are given the answers to 100 math problems and then challenged to use four 4’s to make expressions that equal these numbers. Along the way they will work hundreds of math problems and learn a lot about order of operations, an important concept in beginning algebra and algebra readiness.
BackWards Math is a pdf file (62 k) so it will print well at your site. It will open in a new window. Try this out with your students and you will be extremely pleased with the results. Let me know how it goes. I will post extensions of this activity for those who wish to explore this method further.
- Mr. L
2 responses so far ↓
1 Mr. L // Sep 6, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Mr. L.
My daughter (7th grade) came home this weekend with the Backwards Math homework to do using the four 4s.
I found your site when looking up for some help and found your site. My husband is going crazy trying to help my daughter when only using 4s. They are stuck on 11.
Are there some lines that will not have an answer?
If every line is to have an answer can they use no other number when getting to the answer?
Thank you for your help!
Kim
2 blombard // Sep 6, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Hi Kim,
Normally I don’t post answers to puzzles since I use these puzzles in class and don’t want my students just looking up the answers. But here’s a website that contains your answer:
http://www.dwheeler.com/fourfours/fourfours-short.txt
Best wishes,
Mr. L
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