Week 1: Solving puzzles

Introduction

In this first week you will be focusing on some introductory maths activities. Some of these problems may seem more like puzzles than mathematics, and others will clearly fall into the category of maths problems. To help you there will be hints for you to use, if you need them. All of these puzzles bring up points about how to engage in maths and what is useful to know.

In the following video, the course author Maria Townsend introduces you to Week 1:

Download this video clip.Video player: swim1_week_1_demo1.mp4

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Transcript

Maria Townsend

Like me, many people enjoy completing puzzles without even realising they’re doing some maths at the same time. This Sudoku certainly contains numbers, but does it relate to maths in any other way. I think it does. You see to complete it I have to take a logical step-by-step approach. If I just filled in numbers randomly it would be impossible to complete. And it’s just the same with maths puzzles as you’ll see this week. So next time you see a Sudoku in a paper why not have a go? You can always tell everybody around you that you’re studying.

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After this week, you should be able to:

• tackle maths activities with more confidence
• use addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in different situations
• understand decimal numbers and place value.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey  [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.