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Padlock Challenges is a motivating, innovative and practical way to enable students (Key stage 3 and 4) to engage with statistics and probability. It is a comprehensive set of worksheets from which teachers can construct their own pupil booklets or classroom posters containing a selected set of challenges. Each challenge is carefully constructed to enable students to gain confidence and skills. The conclusion of each challenge is a number determined by their answers; collectively these lead to the combination for a padlock and the route to opening a designated treasure box secured with a chain and combination lock. Find the combination - gain the treasure within.

Padlock Challenge consists of a spiral bound book (A5) containing an introduction and copies of all of the activities; it is accompanied by a CD-Rom with copies of this both in A5 and A4 format. Photocopying and digital routes are thereby available to teachers to personalise and present the challenge to students.

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“This is the follow on from the successful book in the same series on algebra and numbers.
The book is divided into two parts: statistical challenges and probabilistic challenges, and then subdivided into sections ranging from mean, median etc, frequency tables, two way tables, Venn diagrams and various ways of showing in charts. The probability section is broken into assigning probabilities, expected value, probabilities as percentages, expected value, probabilities as percentages and tree diagrams.
This treasure hunt activity is a favourite of many pupils who often do not view it as working but in actual fact may have done more than they would normally with a written exercise.
As I said before, it is a very simple idea, but one that could be very motivating for all pupils”.

Reviewed by N G Macleod

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