I was really looking forward to this problem. I couldn’t wait to see what my classes would do with it and it did not disappoint. I mixed up my classes (assigned seats) and gave them very little direction. I wanted to see what kind of mathematical thinking they would do on their own.
nrich.maths.org
The Counting Cogs is very specific and Nrich has even included step-by-step group directions so students can easily manage the problem in a group. Students need to discover which pairs of cogs will allow a colored tooth on one cog to go into every gap on the other cog. Students cut out the cogs, colored one tooth, and started spinning cogs. Nrich even has an interactive that helped me give some classes an idea of what they should be doing. Thank you Nrich for a great problem.
I was thrilled with the thinking. Some students quickly realized they needed some way to keep track of pairs and created great tables and charts. Some students wanted to immediately begin making conjectures. We talked about proving what we believe to be true, and they began to see that one example is not enough to be a proof. Some students even started creating other cogs than the ones supplied to see if their conjecture really worked. I heard a lot of conjectures! Tomorrow when we begin discussing this problem students will quickly discover the cogs that are relatively prime to each other work and the others do not. I did hear this conjecture today, but students just didn’t have enough time to really prove it.
This problem let students extend their thinking about factors, primes, and relatively prime numbers. They were actually applying these concepts rather than completing another worksheet. I really like the way multiple concepts are intertwined in this problem.
Numbers 