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Like so many investigations, this one is like a journey through a
wood, where we encourage children to keep all their senses alert.
As I've suggested in the introduction to this challenge there are a
number of things you can look at. I have not had the opportunity to
attempted this with KS 1 but I feel that the activity could be done
by those who have a good enquiring mind using a trial and
improvement method and, I guess, some extra patience on your
behalf. It has spatial and numerical possibilities and it would be
very valuable for you to tease out from their minds how they imaged
the whole process. The numerical possibilities are very varied.
Just for example the arrangement of the 16 numbers as posed is
enough to do many hours of work on. For example you could look at
the parallelograms that can be drawn using the 16, 4 by 4 positions
and adding up the numbers at the vertices of each parallelogram.
There is such potential in all this! I hope you find time in Maths
clubs to pursue this to some depth. Please send in all the
solutions and examples of the directions that pupils went in, it
would be good to share so many varied contributions.