After a gap of a few years, I’ve taken to Twitter once again as a source of mathematical ideas and inspiration. It’s great to see just how many maths teachers and educators are regularly posting ideas and resources on Twitter!
I’m sure that you have your own favourite contributors – I’ve recently been enjoying the geometric problems that Catriona Agg (@Cshearer41 on Twitter) has been posting.
Here’s a few examples that Catriona posted in February:
There are several things I love about these problems. Firstly, they’re very accessible and easy to understand but, once you get into them, they can be deceptively difficult and involve some complex processing. I think they could form fantastic starting points for some problem-solving work with students.
I’d encourage you to look through Catriona’s Twitter profile and attempt some of the problems yourself. You’ll hopefully figure out more than one way to approach each problem – and this is where Twitter really comes into its own as, for each of the problems that Catriona has posted, different users around the world have contributed their own particular solutions. Whereas I, for example, resorted to algebra to find the area of the yellow triangle above, others posted solutions that involved elaborate dissections and transformations. They really are problems that keep on giving!
The wonderful thing about Twitter, of course, is that you can quickly discover similar mathematicians posting on the platform and replying to others’ problems. Ed Southall (@edsouthall on Twitter) and Diego Rattaggi (@diegorattaggi on Twitter) have also become Twitter favourites of mine. Happy puzzling!