Try this fun math challenge with your kids!
Let's face it: our pets want to be like us. They want to eat our food, sleep on our beds, and play our games -- like Jenga, where you stack lots of thin wooden blocks, then pull them out one at a time without making the stack fall down. Some guy trained his cat to play, and the cat's pretty good at it, as you can see in this quick video (Note to grown-ups: you might want to stop the video just before the end, around 1:15, since there's a PG-13 word about 5 seconds after that...) While her owner loosens the blocks, the cat carefully bats them out of the stack, and those blocks get placed on top so the game can keep going with a taller and taller tower. How tall can they go without crashing?
Now here's some block-stacking math~
Wee ones: If the cat knocks 8 blocks out of the way but the next one makes the tower topple, how many blocks did the cat knock out in total?
Little kids: If the guy takes the first turn, then the cat, then the guy...who takes the 7th turn? Bonus: Who takes the 18th turn?
Big kids: If a 12-layer stack has 3 blocks in each layer, and they remove the center block from each layer and stack them in new 3-block layers on top, how many layers tall is the tower now? Bonus: If half the blocks in this restacked tower come crashing down from the top, how many layers are left standing?
Let's face it: our pets want to be like us. They want to eat our food, sleep on our beds, and play our games -- like Jenga, where you stack lots of thin wooden blocks, then pull them out one at a time without making the stack fall down. Some guy trained his cat to play, and the cat's pretty good at it, as you can see in this quick video (Note to grown-ups: you might want to stop the video just before the end, around 1:15, since there's a PG-13 word about 5 seconds after that...) While her owner loosens the blocks, the cat carefully bats them out of the stack, and those blocks get placed on top so the game can keep going with a taller and taller tower. How tall can they go without crashing?
Now here's some block-stacking math~
Wee ones: If the cat knocks 8 blocks out of the way but the next one makes the tower topple, how many blocks did the cat knock out in total?
Little kids: If the guy takes the first turn, then the cat, then the guy...who takes the 7th turn? Bonus: Who takes the 18th turn?
Big kids: If a 12-layer stack has 3 blocks in each layer, and they remove the center block from each layer and stack them in new 3-block layers on top, how many layers tall is the tower now? Bonus: If half the blocks in this restacked tower come crashing down from the top, how many layers are left standing?
Find out what's happening in Summitfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Find out what's happening in Summitfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Answers:
Wee ones: 9 blocks.
Little kids: The guy, since it's an odd number. Bonus: The cat, since it's an even number.
Big kids: There are 4 new layers, since 12 blocks get removed and restacked. So the tower has 16 layers total now. Bonus: The bottom 9 layers. There are 36 blocks in total, so the bottom 18 blocks stay standing. They take up 9 layers since the whole bottom 12 layers have just 2 blocks per layer.
