For over a decade, Which One Doesn't Belong? (WODB; Danielson, 2016) has been a beloved classroom routine that invites students to engage in mathematical decision-making and justification. In the WODB routine, four related figures are shown to students, and they are asked to decide which of them doesn't belong with the other three. The beauty of…

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…

Metalinguistic Awareness is the ability to consciously reflect on and manipulate language, from the level of the phoneme, to words, to whole phrases. Research has shown that engaging in metalinguistic activities can have a positive impact on reading. This article details some of the component skills of metalinguistic awareness (in this case,…

The recent increase in the number of mathematics museums has given rise to a need for tools with which to design and assess mathematics educational proposals in this non-formal context. This study proposes the use of the van Hiele model, a benchmark in mathematics instruction, for the design of interactive museum models focusing on mathematics…

A digital escape room is a gamified activity in which students work collaboratively to solve a series of tasks or riddles within a certain amount of time. They are typically embedded in a story framework at the end of which students need to "escape" an imaginary scenario. Students explore the target culture while using the target…

In creating crossword puzzles themselves, students gain an understanding of a concept in order to create the clue for it. The instructor can make this activity either chapter- or domain-specific, for instance, to encourage reading the textbook and researching concepts. In this unique application of the self-generated crossword, students use free…

In this paper, we provide an overall perspective on the teaching and learning of discrete mathematics. Our aim is to highlight what research has been conducted in this area and to connect it to existing research ideas for future work. We begin by characterizing discrete mathematics and its role in the school curriculum, highlighting themes,…

Chemical escape rooms (ChEsRms) are educational games in which students use their brain, chemical knowledge, intuition, and a bit of luck to solve a mystery. At the Weizmann Institute, we have developed ChEsRms that are implemented by teachers in their classes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic stopped all the educational activities that took place in…

The Three-Square Puzzle shows a remarkable relationship between three angles. What happens when the number of squares increases? This article explores that question and brings in Fibonacci and Lucas sequences.

This teaching brief describes an engaging, in-class exercise that introduces genetic algorithms as well as advanced Excel functions and capabilities by modeling the familiar Sudoku puzzle. Student groups are first asked to manually solve a given puzzle and then translate that solution methodology to a spreadsheet model. This exercise can be used…

The computer game Foldit is currently widely used as a biology and biochemistry teaching aid. Herein, we introduce a new feature of Foldit called "custom contests" that allows educators to create puzzles that fit their curriculum. The effectiveness of the custom contests is demonstrated by the use of five distinct custom contests in an…

Games are highly appreciated by the population, so due to the COVID-19 pandemic confinement we decided to carry out an Internet research of several games, in order to use them for the assimilation of new words of Biochemical students. Games found in puzzle books allow the stimulation of memory, reasoning and other brain capacities, such as keeping…

In the contemporary landscape of science education, teachers aspire to implement approaches that engage students with diverse teaching methods in diverse learning environments. By reviewing educational literature that deals with chemical escape rooms (ChEsRms), we can find several purposes they serve; however, only a few papers used ChEsRms for…

Breakout boxes are similar to the escape rooms that have popped up all over the country in the past few years. In an escape room, you and your friends are locked in a room and given a scenario and a time limit. You must work together to solve a number of puzzles to get out of the room before time runs out. Breakout boxes center around boxes, each…

The paper concerns an important but underappreciated genre of algorithmic puzzles, explaining what these puzzles are, reviewing milestones in their long history, and giving two different ways to classify them. Also covered are major applications of algorithmic puzzles in cognitive science research, with an emphasis on insight problem solving, and…