I don’t tend to buy The Times, so I haven’t seen their
puzzle pages for years. I was given a
copy of Saturday’s edition and found they have some nice problems. There are the expected crosswords and several
variants of Su Doku (which they spell as two words). And then there is something called ‘Cell
Blocks’.
The puzzle itself is a nice one that can be used in class
as a way of practising the recall of small primes and factors.
The reason for mentioning this here, though is the
instructions, which are a good talking point in their own right.
“Divide the grid into blocks. Each block must be square or rectangular …”. Um, so they must be “rectangular”, then!
This is reminiscent of The Independent who originally said about Sudoku (spelled like
that): “There's no maths involved. You solve the puzzle with reasoning and
logic.” Um, so we are using
mathematical skills, then!
[To be fair, as long as they are not meaning XOR the instructions in The Times are accurate, whereas the ones from The Independent were plain wrong.]
This is puzzle 1568 and if I assume that there is one
published each day except for Sundays (figuring that the Sunday Times is a
separate newspaper) then it has been over five years since Cell Blocks first
appeared. I wonder how many letters they
have received in that time telling them that “rectangular” would cover all
cases?
Using it in class
This will be a starter activity, with the following written
on the board:
1] Solve the
problem.
2] What is the
unnecessary part of the instructions?
3] Assuming there
is one of these in The Times from
Monday to Saturday, how long ago is it since they started being printed?
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