Creativity is often characterized by the capacity to generate novel ideas, explore unconventional approaches, and solve problems through intuition, curiosity, and innovative thinking. Assessing this multifaceted skill is both essential and challenging, especially in educational and game-based environments where creativity drives engagement and…

This article presents an original puzzle that supports students' development of visual thinking and geometry ideas based on the Van Hiele levels of geometric thought. The "Triangle Puzzle" is one of many tools teachers can use to guide students' learning of geometry. The Van Hiele's theory provides a way to assess and support this…

This article presents a reflection on a teaching experience involving the use of the Brügner tangram, an interesting but little-known manipulative material. It details an activity conducted as part of an undergraduate mathematics education course for prospective primary school teachers. The main objective of this paper is to present the…

An interesting Sangaku problem was chosen and a multidirectional study was performed, which included finding the locus of a circle's center moving while being tangent to two circles. It also included finding the radius of that circle given the datum that it is also tangent to the side of an isosceles triangle. Two different proofs are presented of…

Math is increasingly recognized as a critical part of what young children are exposed to and learn in early childhood programs. Geometry is one of three focal areas emphasized for early childhood, and opportunities for geometry learning are present in many manipulatives present in early childhood classrooms. Yet geometry remains an understudied…

One of Gardner's passions was to introduce puzzles into the classroom. From this point of view, polyomino dissections are an excellent topic. They require little background, provide training in geometric visualization, and mostly they are fun. In this article, we put together a large collection of such puzzles, introduce a new approach in solving…

Two studies investigated the effects of a storytelling-context for teaching geometry skills to kindergarten girls and boys. In Study 1, the story+geometry intervention consisted of an adventure story teaching geometry through part-whole-relations puzzles. Learning was assessed through transfer of skills, using a pre-/post design comparing…

Calculation of the percentage of work completed when the edges of jigsaw puzzles have been assembled provides interesting problems. (SD)

In this article, the author describes a 200-year-old ladder problem that can carry learners to high levels of mathematical thinking and activity. This problem requires learners to go from a word problem to an equation to a graph and from there to a solution. As this problem of specifics is turned into a problem using variables, technology,…

Illustrates how mathematicians work and do mathematical research through the use of a puzzle. Demonstrates how general rules, then theorems develop from special cases. This approach may be used as a research project in high school classrooms or math club settings with the teacher helping to formulate questions, set goals, and avoid becoming…

Explores a variety of approaches to solving one geometry problem illustrating the work of teachers, the flow of their ideas, and the diverse areas of mathematics they applied. (KHR)

A journal called the Ladies' Diary published from 1704 to 1841, presented mathematical problems, and solutions to the problems. The purposes of the journal are compared to those of Scientific American today. (SD)

Provides domino geometry problems, problems with arithmetic progressions, and magic pentagram sums. (JM)

Develops a classification scheme for mathematical problem-solving activities. Presents problems generated in solid and plane geometry and fractions. (JM)

The Invisible Wall Project analyzes problem-solving processes of children in Grades 3 and 4 and Grades 8 and 9. The central idea of the research is to use sets of tasks that are all unsolvable, which means they have a goal that cannot be reached. The unsolvability, however, is of a kind that can be understood even by younger children. In our case,…