Puzzles & Games

If you have finished school today or are already on holiday then have an excellent and well-deserved break. For those still at school, enjoy the last days of the term. If you are still at school for a few days, I have been keeping the Christmas Resources and Advent Calendar pages updated.

Added recently, I do like Dr Tom Bennison’s Christmas Calculated Colouring for A Level students – these make perfect Christmas activities for older students.

Dr Tom Bennison – Christmas Calculated Coloring 2022

You can access calculated colouring resources from previous years also and have a look at his other Christmas themed resources.

On the subject of Christmas Cards…

For the last few years, I have made Christmas Cards for students using Chalkdust resources, Matthew Scroggs has designed the 2022 Chalkdust card. You can use an interactive or pdf version.

See also the cards from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Recently published is the GCHQ 2022 Christmas Challenge features seven puzzles based on the seven disciplines of languages, engineering, codebreaking, analysis, maths, coding and cyber security

For more puzzles, a search on the GCHQ site returns many puzzles to keep you busy! We can also search on Christmas, this search returns cards and Christmas puzzles from earlier years.

For arts and craft lovers – construct a Christmas card from Clarissa Grandi on Artful Maths. I see for 2017, Clarissa used Spirograph, a great idea for Christmas cards. As a child, my Spirograph was definitely a favourite toy, if you don’t have a Spirograph set you could use this brilliant digital version, Inspirograph by Nathan Friend. Try altering the gears so that the fixed and rotating gear are the same size, or make one size a factor of the other, make the two sizes have a common factor, or not! Investigate. You can change the colours too and create a work of Art! Now there’s an app too – Spirograph on your phone!