Target Boards Instructions
TargetBoards are a great fun way for your class to practice arithmetic during Maths Week. Pupils won’t even realise they are working! There is a senior section for upper primary schools and a junior section for younger pupils.
TargetBoards will begin on 14 October and run each day until 18 October for Maths Week.
You must register your class to participate and use the same registration code each day to accumulate your score. If you have registered for previous Targetboards you must register anew for this campaign.
The leading 10 schools each day will feature on the leaderboard.
Special thanks to Simon Lewis, Principal of Carlow Educate Together for devising this activity. Kevin Gill for coding it and Dr Kieran Murphy for additional algorithms.
Instructions
You will need to register for the Maths Week 2024 TargetBoard Campaign.
Even if you are registered for a previous campaign you will still need to register anew.
Simply register your class here and you can familiarise by playing the demonstration game.
You will be issued with a class code which is used for keeping your entries together (it is not intended as a security tool). This code will be for the Maths Week 2024 campaign only. Record this code.
The code will be contained in an email from mathsweek@wit.ie – if you don’t receive it, please check your junk/spam/clutter folders. The code is for Targetboards only, and not for any other section of the website.
Teachers must share the code with their class (if they are using separate devices) for their scores to count together.
If a score is not counted, someone else in the class may have entered that answer – answers are only counted once for a group.
If you can’t access Targetboards it might mean that you are using an old registration code. Please register again.
A new Target Board will be published each day for Maths Week 2024 from 14 – 18 October. They will come live at 8:30am and run until 3.30pm.
When you have a valid code you can play the demonstration game at any time.
(scores won’t be recorded for the demonstration game.)
How to play
Participants are given a set of 9 numbers. Using any of these numbers (only once in each expression) and the four operators (+, -, *, /) find out how many expressions you can make that equate to the target number. The more the better!
The operators are
+ addition
– Subtraction
* Multiplication
/ Division
You must use * for multiplication and / for division. You can also group parts of the expression using brackets ( ).
Examples
1+2+3 = 6
1+2*3 = 7
(1+2)*3 = 9
Prohibited entries
- Use of repeated operators as in “4++++5” is not allowed as it is not mathematically valid
- Prefixing 0 to given numbers as in “05” for “5” is not allowed to avoid trivial multiple entries
- Brackets that do not affect the order of operations are ignored when determining whether the entry is unique to avoid trivial multiple entries such as “3+5”, “(3+5)”, “((3+5))”, etc.
- There is no unary plus operator, e.g. “4+8” cannot be written as “+4*8”