The Delta College Middle School Mathematics Competion is a one-day event serving approximately 25 schools and 600 students in the greater mid-Michigan area. This year the theme of the competition is “Math makes the pieces fit!” As a morning entertainment project we are assembling what the puzzle manufacturer Ravensburger (www.ravensburger.com) bills as the “World’s Largest Puzzle!” The puzzle is an 18,240-piece compilation of four world maps from the 16th and 17th centuries. When completed, the puzzle will be approximately 9 feet wide and 6 feet high. (See page 23.)

Our goal is to assemble the puzzle in a world-record time. On the day of the event we expect to use approximately 250 volunteers. Volunteers will receive an ordinary sandwich storage bag containing 9 snack bags, each of which contains 9 pieces of the puzzle that will form a 3x3 square. The assignment will be to assemble nine 3x3 squares, then use those squares to form a single 9x9 square of 81 pieces. Other volunteers will then assemble nine 9x9 squares to form a 27x27 square of 729 pieces. Specially-trained professionals will then assemble the approximately twenty-six 27x27 squares to form the completed puzzle. This is truly a task of biblical proportions!

Of course, in order to prepare the activity we must start with a completed puzzle. Faculty in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Delta College are currently volunteering their time to assemble the puzzle, which arrived from Ravensburger in four 4,560-piece bags (thank goodness!).

One of our goals is to show the students, teachers, and parents an example of how a very large task can be reduced to many small parallel tasks and then brought together to form a solution in a recursive fashion.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the extreme disorientation of this assembly, we are spinning off many other entertaining problems. Apart from the basic perimeter and area problems, there are several fun ways to generate problems in counting, factoring, sorting, history, geography, map-making, related rates, and orientation.

Mathematics is everywhere!

David Redman, Two-Year College Vice Chair

Back to the Spring 2007 Newsletter

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