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Do your students' brains seem a little lazy lately? Energize them with some brainteasers -- problems and puzzles that will get those neurons sparking and get the blood flowing to the head. Included: Additional puzzle resources for kids of all ages!

If you're looking for puzzles for very young students, you'll find those in the Additional Puzzle Resources section at the end of this story.

WORK IT OUT!

Brain Teasers
The Brain Teasers site, from Houghton Mifflin, provides new brainteasers each week and posts solutions the following week. Choose a puzzle appropriate for students in grades 3 and 4, 5 and 6, or 7 and up and select This Week's Question, Last Week's Question, or the Archives. If you're stuck for an answer, click the magnifying glass for a hint. If you're really stuck, you can click the light bulb for the solution. The Mystery Number puzzle below is from the Grades 5 and 6 Archive.

I am a four-digit number with no two digits the same. My ones digit is twice my thousands digit and one less than my tens digit. My hundreds digit is the difference between my tens digit and my thousands digit. My thousands digit is an odd number less than 6. What number am I?

Brainbinders.com
Not all brain puzzles require reading. Try this origami puzzle, for example. To solve the puzzle, print Puzzle 2002 from the Brainbinders.com site (reduced-size sample to the right), cut it out, and make two folds so that you end with a solid color on each side. You'll find almost 50 different puzzles at Brainbinders.com. This one is one of the easiest. Others require two, three, four, or five folds to solve.

Mathematical Problems
Take your students' brains on a "power walk" to this site. There you'll find Math brainteasers like the one below.

A banana plantation is located next to a desert. The plantation owner has 3000 bananas that he wants to transport to the market by camel, across a 1000 kilometre stretch of desert. The owner has only one camel, which carries a maximum of 1000 bananas at any moment in time, and eats one banana every kilometre it travels. What is the largest number of bananas that can be delivered at the market?

Brain Teasers from Pick Your Brain!
Are your students ready for a real workout? Then have them try the puzzle below. You'll find it and 11 other brainteasers at Brain Teasers from Pick Your Brain, a student project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A woman is reading a book. Each day, she reads half of the remaining book. The book has 348 pages. How many days will it take her to finish the book?

Serendip Brain and Behavior
The Prisoners' Dilemma puzzle (below) is just one of the interactive activities at Serendip Brain and Behavior. Your students might also try Pattern Detection and Serendipity, Blindsight: Seeing What You Don't See, Seeing More than Your Eye Does, and others. Many of the puzzles at this site require the Java plug-in.

A fiendish cyberspace wizard has locked you and Serendip into a diabolical game. On each turn of the game, you each must choose, without knowing the other's choice, between cooperating with each other and trying to take advantage of each other. Following every turn of the game, you will each receive a certain number of gold coins, depending on the choices you made. If you both decide to cooperate, you will each receive three gold coins. If one of you decides to cooperate but the other chooses competition, the competitor will receive five gold coins and the cooperator none. If you both decide to compete, each will receive a single gold coin. Your chances of surviving are closely related to the average number of coins you have. If the average drops below a critical number (chosen in an unknown way by the wizard), a foul fate will befall you. Since neither of you knows the critical number, neither of you has any choice but to try, on each and every turn, to maximize your own income. Can you find a successful strategy?

The rec.puzzles archive
The rec.puzzles archive offers many classic mind-benders, categorized by subject area. Among the two dozen subject areas you'll find are analogies, cryptograms, language puzzles, logic puzzles, problems of probability, riddles, and trivia puzzles. Three sample puzzles appear below.

Bear (a geometry puzzle): If a hunter goes out his front door, goes 50 miles south, then goes 50 miles west, shoots a bear, goes 50 miles north and ends up in front of his house, what color was the bear?

Logic Puzzle 29: Three people check into a hotel. They pay the manager $30 and go to their room. The manager finds out that the room rate is $25 and gives $5 to the bellboy to return to the guests. On the way to the room, the bellboy decides that $5 would be difficult to share among three people so he pockets $2 and gives $1 to each person. Now each person has paid $10 and gotten $1 back. So each guest paid $9, for a total of $27, and the bellboy has $2 -- for a total of $29. Where is the other dollar?

Riddle 8: I know a word of letters three. Add two and fewer there will be.

Dr. Matrix' Web World of Science
Some puzzles are classics, such as The Fork in the Road. Others, such as The Counterfeit Coins, offer new twists on old classics. Which ones can you solve?

A vacationer finds himself on an island inhabited by two tribes. Members of one tribe always tell the truth. Members of the other tribe always lie. The vacationer comes to a fork in a road and asks a native which branch he should take to reach a village. He doesn't know whether the native is a truth-teller or a liar. The vacationer thinks a moment, then asks one question. From the reply he knows which road to take. What question does he ask?

You have ten stacks of coins, each consisting of ten half-dollars. One of those stacks is counterfeit, but you don't know which. You do know the weight of a genuine half-dollar and you know that each counterfeit coin weighs 1 gram more than it should. You may weigh the coins. What is the fewest number of weighings you'll need to determine which stack is counterfeit?

Thinks.com
While you're trying to figure out the answer to the last puzzle, don't miss the puzzles at Thinks.com. Click Go Puzzles and you'll find a number of different kinds of puzzles, including Puzzles by Sam Lloyd and Doublets. Can you solve them?

The Milkman's Puzzle: Honest John says, "What I don't know about milk is scarcely worth mentioning," but he is flabbergasted one day when each of two ladies asks him for 2 quarts of milk. One lady has a 5-quart pail and the other has a 4-quart pail. John has only two 10-gallon cans, each full of milk. How does he measure out exactly 2 quarts of milk for each lady?

Doublets: Change only one letter at a time to turn MILK into PAIL and MICE into RATS.

MORE PUZZLES -- MOSTLY VISUAL

The following sites include multiple -- and worthwhile -- puzzles, but most are too visual to show here. You'll just have to visit them!

Brain Games
From Neuroscience for Kids, these puzzles include Brain Hieroglyphics, On-Line Response Time experiments, a crossword puzzle, a memory game, and more. Can you recognize the upside down faces?

Memory
Click any of the titles next to Online Exhibits for a variety of memory games from the Exploratorium Online. Here you can try to name the head under Elvis's hair, identify the Droodles, or remember what you see.

Mega Mathematics
This long-time favorite is terrific for students in grades 4 and above. Visitors can stay at Hotel Infinity, stage a play at Unusual School, or unravel knotty dilemmas at Untangling the Mathematics of Knots. The problems here take longer to set up, but they're worth it. Each one includes a comprehensive teaching plan -- but your students won't notice.

Imagiware Games
This site provides several brain-busting games, including Master Web, a game of logic in which the object is to decipher the code represented by a series of colored balls.

Mathpuzzle.com
The Puzzle of the Week here is definitely not for beginners. The list of links is as comprehensive as you'll find anywhere, but most of the puzzles are for older students and adults.

Don't stop yet! The Web offers plenty of exercises to help your students keep their brains in shape. Check them out whenever you or your students need a boost.

ADDITIONAL PUZZLE RESOURCES

Brother Bear's Brain Teasers
Includes two brainteasers for young children.

Build-a-Monster
Young children match heads, torsos, and feet to create a dinosaur.

Elementary School Math Problems, Puzzles, Tips & Tricks
Middle School Math Problems, Puzzles, Tips & Tricks and High School Math Problems, Puzzles, Tips & Tricks from the Math Forum contain links to lots of puzzle sites. The sites include manipulative, visual, and word puzzles.

Funbrain.com
Puzzles and games for students from 6 to 15, at several levels of difficulty. These puzzles are subject-based but fun.

Sound Puzzles Word Finder
A new puzzle every day for students in middle school and above. Each puzzle consists of three parts requiring a variety of language skills. Solvers have to visit every day, however, since this site doesn't have an archive.

BRAIN RESOURCES FOR KIDS

Amazing Brain Facts: Index
Includes lots of information about the brain, written for kids in small word bites!

Jay's Brain
This Discovery Channel site features experiments to find out how the brain works as well as other brain-related articles and activities.

Neuroscience for Kids
A great resource on the nervous system, this site includes an explanation of the development, structure, and function of the brain, written in language that kids can understand.

NeuroLab Online
Classrooms around the world join NASA personnel as they prepare for the NeuroLab mission, which will conduct brain research to study neurological and behavioral changes in space.

Article by Linda Starr
Education World®
Copyright © 2005 Education World

Originally published 05/17/1999
Links last updated 07/05/2005

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