Fall 2011 Conclusion

The Fall Puzzle Party 2011 was held on Nov 5, 2011 at Farmington Hills Public Library in partnership with Steppingstone School for Gifted Education. This event was focused on kids aged 7 through 13. We had approximately 35 kids from Farmington Hills and nearby areas.

The arrival and setup of teams took a bit of time as the participants were new to the event idea. The participants picked chits with the team names from a basket and joined their teams.

We had to shuffle some of the team members around to balance the teams a bit in terms of number of participants and also the age. We ended up having six teams total each with 5 or 6 participants. We distributed the puzzles to the team at around 2:30 and off they went.

I had few friends helping me with the event. The idea was NOT to help the teams with the solutions but help them understand puzzles. Some teams with older kids got off to a good start whereas some other kids had to be helped a bit to get them going.

Lessons Learned

I will admit that the puzzles I picked were more appropriate for kids aged 9+ and younger kids had little tough times with some of them

Puzzles

Here are the puzzle topics. Now, I usually don’t post the puzzles online as I may need to reuse those for other events!

Popular puzzles

Movie Rebus

In my other parties, the Movie Rebus type puzzles were the most popular. However, in this event, most of the kids had never experienced such puzzles. So, each team was given examples and then they got into it. Let’s see if you can figure out the movie from the Rebus given below.

Well, this should be very simple to solve. Visual description is “K in G and K on G” and hence the solution is King Kong.

Lego Describing

Lego describing is a puzzle where two members of a team are chosen and taken to a separate room. They sit facing away from each other. One member picked as “Describer” is given a structure made up of logo blocks. The other member plays the role of the “Builder” and is given the loose pieces which can be put together to make the structure. The Describer will have to describe the object to the Builder and the Builder will have to build the structure. The teams are given 10 minutes each to complete the puzzle. The points are given based on the accuracy of the completed structure. One team got full points and one other team could muster up 80% of the points. Then there were teams who couldn’t go pass 10-15% of the points. The winning team had lots of great communication between the Describer and Builder and especially verbal verification by the Builder back to Describer. That was some great team work guys!

Memory Puzzle

The other puzzle was Memory puzzle. The idea is that the teams are shown an object for 5 minutes and they are allowed to inspect all aspects of that object. At the end of that 5 minutes, the Puzzlemaster gives them a set of questions which they can answer form their observation and memory of the object. This time around, I had chosen a dollar bill as the object and there were 5 questions with one bonus questions. The US dollar bill has tons of symbols, icons in the pictures and numbers. Here are few questions from the party – see if you can figure any of those out.

1. There is a number noted in roman numerals at the bottom of the pyramid? What is the value of this number in decimal system?

2. How many eyes are there on the note?

Bonus question – worth 25 points

Q. Besides the number “1”, there’s another number which is represented in many different ways on this note. What is this number and what does it signify?

Surprisingly there were few enthusiastic parents who formed their own team and competed with the kids. To keep things equal, I had to reduce their points by 25% and they also had a late start. They really enjoyed themselves.

Solution Review

Anyways, the best part of the puzzle party event as always was the solution review. The “Aha!” moments were a plenty and it was priceless to see the expressions on their little faces when they really understood the approach or the solution! Many parents have joined back at that time to pick up their kids and this was a lesson for them too. I really hope that they learned something new and do more of these types of puzzle solving.

At the end, the Team A won the Fall Puzzle Party. Here’s the final point tally.

Prizes

All the kids in the Team A received a book (see the list below) as prize. All the kids received certificates.

Check out the books on Amazon

http://amzn.com/w/1VT5MNZMZADY9

Fractals, Googols, and Other Mathematical Tales by Theoni Pappas

Q Is for Quark: A Science Alphabet Book by David M. Schwartz, Kim Doner

The Man Who Counted: A Collection of Mathematical Adventures by Malba Tahan, et al.

G Is for Googol: A Math Alphabet Book by David M. Schwartz, Marissa Moss

Further Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas

The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, et al

Thank you

I have to thank Norm Meluch, Gopal, Bhagvati, Pranav and Anandhi who supported the event. Norm took charge of the Lego describing puzzle administration and that was extremely helpful as I could go around and watch the teams and help other helpers as required.

Thanks to Steppingstone school for taking the initiative and Thanks to Farmington Public Library to provide the facilities.

Check out few pictures below

When's next Puzzle Party for Kids?

The next Puzzle Party for kids will be in Jan 2012. Please watch this space for the event details.

Until next time…

Your Puzzlemaster.

Hiren Bhatt