Cheltenham Challenges: Making Sense and Making Puzzles

At the Cheltenham Science Festival we were showing the puzzles called Light Box and Hexagon Colouring.

Each puzzle contains a set of (around a dozen) slides. Both sets of slides are like a journey of discovery - the writer is jotting down their thoughts and questions as they do more experimenting with the scripts. The slides suggest activities you may wish to experiment with - if you feel you've got lost, don't worry, you can refresh the page and start again.

Challenges

Now that you've explored our puzzles - are you ready for your own journey of discovery?

You can explore and modify the puzzles however you like. To do this you may need to look among the menus for Observable List and Agent List and look at the names you find there. Can you guess what some of these observables do? What happens if you assign new values to these observables? Try it by clicking on an observable, typing a new value in the Input Window, and clicking on Submit.

To get you started, here are a couple of challenges you might like to try.

Challenge 1: The Orange Hexagon

See if you can find out how to colour a particular hexagon orange (or purple if you prefer!).

See if you can colour hexagons orange whenever you click the little red square.

Challenge 2: The Longest Ray in the Light Box

Suppose each mirror is in a square cell 4cm wide. Assume the distance from any torch to the cells, and the thickness of cell sides, is negligible. So the length of a light ray from Torch W1 to Torch E1 is 16cm.

Put mirrors in the cells of the box and light torches to produce a ray of length more than 24cm. Do you think there could be longer rays of light with some positions of mirrors? How long could they be?

There are no prizes at this stage! Register your interest and you will hear more.

The CONSTRUIT! Project

These puzzles were created as part of the CONSTRUIT! project. If you would like some more details about the CONSTRUIT! project, please complete the form below and we will invite you to participate in the project.

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ERASMUS+ Programme 2014
Key Action 2
Project number
2014-1-UK01-KA200-001818

This page is a "working document" containing both public information about the project and private resources for the use of project members.

The public website for the project, which contains the official outputs from the project, is hosted at construit.org.