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Triangle in a triangle problemFiled in Maths on May 19th 06 .
Most students get the hang of these little puzzles quite quickly and actually get to enjoy them. I usually liken them to playing draughts when you hop over about 7 or 8 pieces and take them all, these problems provide easily explained examples of a chain of reasoning. Geometry also has the feel of things fitting together because there is only one way they can which might be mentally attractive in these days of constant change and flux (two of our extended group of students were recently made redundant; the College is now rather more important to these two than previously as they explore new skill sets). Some students find the ‘refocussing’ needed to ‘see’ the three triangles in the diagram difficult. These students also need to be prompted to look at the triangle with the most information in first – ie ABD as there are two known angles in that triangle. Based on a small sample (5 students spread over three classes) these students also seem to have problems with ‘if…then’ constructions, such as ‘if I know the apex angle in the isosceles triangle, I can find the value of the two equal sized angles’. I have taken to asking ‘how many triangles are there in this diagram’ when introducing problems of this type, and that seems to help. Diagram snapped from a doodle on paper and processed with scanr. This is filed under Maths. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are closed for this post. |
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