Crunch Time: how did the students perform?

Abstract

Two newspaper numbers games based on simple arithmetic relationships are discussed. One is rather trivial, but very useful as an introduction to the second, whose potential to give students of elementary algebra practice in semi-ad hoc reasoning and to build general arithmetic reasoning skills was explored theoretically in an earlier paper. Preliminary results on the effectiveness of this general approach are presented, with student performance and feedback on an assignment task and formal examination included, and recommendations for future work.

Keywords:

• number crunch
• cracking the safe
• elementary algebra
• reasoning skills