Have you ever heard of the dice puzzle called POLAR BEARS ?
It stumped me -big time! Students who haven’t seen this will love it, and even if they have seen it, they’ll get a kick out of watching classmates struggle!
You can use this slide deck to present the puzzle to your class. Hints are provided, but the solution is not given. Find the solution HERE, along with additional perplexing dice puzzles!
The Polar Bear puzzle is also sometimes called “Petals Around the Rose.” Once I discovered it, I was immediately on the hunt for more like it, specifically dice puzzles that require divergent or logical thinking. I also began dabbling with dice to create my own!
The picture below shows a dice game in progress. Can you figure out how the game is played? This puzzle is similar to the challenges in You’ve Got Game: Figure Out the Rules!
The game in progress (above) is in my new Math and Logic Progressive Puzzle –“Dabbling with Dice.” The answer is revealed in the end, after students have worked their way through all four puzzles! Students can ask for hints if they get stumped (as in the slide show linked above).
More brain-bending dice puzzles:
SPOTLESS DICE – I love the thinking that happens with these puzzles. You can also read this description of how David Butler (Australian educator) presented these to students.
DAYS of the MONTH DICE PUZZLE – Show this video up to the “pause and think” portion. Make sure students understand that it involves writing numbers on the dice rather than pips (dots); this is important to solving the puzzle. If you show the solution part of the video, give extra credit for finding an error in word usage. The word dices is used as the plural form of die! (ugh!) However, this was the clearest presentation of the problem and solution I could find, so in this case, I’d just turn this “problem” into another teachable moment.
LETTER DICE PUZZLE – This is definitely a logical thinking puzzle. I hope this site remains active because this is a good puzzle. To share with students, I would just display the web page and zoom in on the pictures.
DOTTY SIX – This one is worth mentioning again! Determining the rules is easy, but articulating them is trickier. Have your students create different versions of this game (in other words, S.C.A.M.P.E.R. it!). This is where they begin to discover what works and what doesn’t! You can read what I shared in our Facebook group in the picture below!
I’m sure I’ve just scraped the surface when it comes to dice puzzles, so if you know of others, comment below or share in our Facebook group. I love the probability and computation ones as well and will have to share some of my favorites in a future post!
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