Magic Square

A Maths Starter of The Day

This page requires the Flash Player.

Click here for a version of this activity that does not require Flash.

 How many different solutions can you find?

 

Starter of The Day Menu | Transum Software | Privacy Policy


Keywords: Starter | Arithmetic

  • Transum,
  • Saturday, April 23, 2011
  • "Teachers can vary the difficulty of this starter. Classes requiring more support could be told the line total (15) and the teacher could drag some numbers into position to give the students a less difficult problem to solve. Answers can be found below and a self marking student version of this activity, for which the students can earn trophies, can also be found by following the link near the bottom of this page."
  • Mrs Boussouara's Maths Class S1, Holyrood Secondary School Gasgow
  • Thursday, September 22, 2011
  • "Mrs Boussouara's first year class thought this was hard but Charelle got the corrct answer. Well done Charelle!!"

How did you use this starter? Can you suggest how teachers could present or develop this resource? Do you have any comments? It is always useful to receive feedback and helps make this free resource even more useful for Maths teachers anywhere in the world.
Click here to enter your comments.

If you don't have the time to provide feedback we'd really appreciate it if you could give this page a score! We are constantly improving and adding to these starters so it would be really helpful to know which ones are most useful. Simply click on a button below:

Excellent, I would like to see more like this
Good, achieved the results I required
Satisfactory
Didn't really capture the interest of the students
Not for me! I wouldn't use this type of activity.

This starter has scored a mean of 3.7 out of 5 based on 156 votes.

 

Previous Day | This starter is for 14 May | Next Day


Transum Shop Visit the Transum Online Shop Transum Shop
Transum Shop

Answers

There are eight solutions. Are they all completely different?

2 7 6
9 5 1
4 3 8

 

2 9 4
7 5 3
6 1 8

 

4 3 8
9 5 1
2 7 6

 

4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6
6 1 8
7 5 3
2 9 4

 

6 7 2
1 5 9
8 3 4

 

8 1 6
3 5 7
4 9 2

 

8 3 4
1 5 9
6 7 2

A magic square features in Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. It is the Order Eight Franklin Square which was first published in 1769 by American scientist Benjamin Franklin.
Computer Teacher, do your students have access to computers?
Do you have "Laptops in Lessons"?

Whether your students each have a TabletPC or share a desktop PC, this activity lends itself to eLearning (Engaged Learning).

Laptop

Here is the URL which will take them to a concise version of this page.

Transum.org/go/?Start=May14

Here's the URL which will take
them to a student version of this activity (without the answers!).

http://www.transum.org/go/?to=Magic

 

Here are the oldest magic squares we know of:

Lo Shu Square

Lo Shu Square

The Lo Shu square on the back of a small turtle in the centre, surrounded by the signs of the Chinese Zodiac and the Eight trigrams, all carried by a large turtle

Dürer's Magic Square

This famous 4 by 4 magic square above can be seen in the picture below. Melencolia I is an engraving by the German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer.

Dürer's Melancholia

Magic Square Bridging Units from Smile Mathematics