A pack of playing cards provides amazing opportunities to increase our ‘number sense’, the ability to re arrange numbers to explore possible solutions.

As a warm up, re arrange these 16 cards so that the same picture or suit (heart, diamond, club or spade) appears only once in either row, column, or the two diagonals.

Each of these picture cards are worth 10 points and the ace can be either worth 11 or 1, all the other cards are worth the number value printed on the card

that is, this card is worth 6 …  

• Is it possible to make 100 by adding some or all of the cards from one suit?
• What if you were able to multiple, subtract or add?
• How could you be systematic to know you had all the possibilities?

You might like to start with,

• Is it possible to make 20, twenty ways?
• Find a strategy to find all the ways to make 20, then retry with the first question.

To challenge yourself,

• If we were to use all the cards of one suit only, is it possible to use any operation, brackets etc. to make the total of the cards equal to 10?

Enjoy,

Stephanie van der Schans

AST/Numeracy