The Olympics: Math Puzzles and a Game

[Photo by striatic.]

Maybe it’s because school is out for the summer, but there don’t seem to be all that many Olympics-related math resources on the Web. I did find one cool game, however, and a nice stack of word problems. I hope you enjoy them!

Olympics Math in the “News”

Report: Olympics Mathematically Likely To Happen This Year
Satire from The Onion. [Hat tip: Isabel at God Plays Dice.]

Playing Around with Math

Math Playground Olympics Game
“Answer 20 multiple choice questions correctly to win the Math Olympics. Topics range from basic computation and general math knowledge to word problems with percentages, ratios, and fractions.” (Grades 4+.)

Olympics Word Problems

Summer 2008 Olympics Theme Unit
Many varied resources for the members of edHelper.com. Even as a non-member, I was able to get several sample worksheets of word problems:

• Summer Olympic Baseball, grades 1-2
• Summer Olympic Swimming, grades 1-2
• Summer Olympic Track and Field, grades 5-6
• Summer Olympic Gymnastics, grades 5-6
• Summer Olympic Diving, grades 5-6
• Summer Olympic Math (middle school) #1
• Summer Olympic Math (middle school) #2
• Algebra: Number of medals won
• Logic: Number of medals won

MathCounts Olympic Problems of the Week
Problems about past Summer Olympics, from the MathCounts archive, for grades 6+:

• Five Rings: The Olympics Begin (Solutions)
• Two Weeks in the Village: The Olympics Continue (Solutions)
• One Last Time: The Last Week of the Olympics (Solutions)
• The Olympics Aren’t Cheap (Solutions)
• Catching Olympic Fever (Solutions)
• Olympic Dreams Coming True (Solutions)
• Olympic Shot Put Math (Solutions)
• In The News… (Solutions)
• The Ever-Changing Olympics (Solutions)
• The Water Cube (Solutions not posted, as of this edit.)

Hold Your Own Summer Olympics

A Measure of Greatness
“Elementary students participate in a number of Olympic-type activities, such as a cotton ball shot put, paper plate discus throw, high arm jump, straw javelin throw, and sponge squeeze, as they practice measurement skills.”

Math Research Activities

Olympic Records Through Time
“Are we faster, stronger, better than we used to be? Compare the records of gold medal Olympic winners for the last 100 years and decide.” (Graphing.)

Olympic Math Idea
Questions to prompt research into the correlation of population and economic numbers with each country’s medal count.

Math and the Olympics: An Inquiry Unit
An outline of what looks like it could be an interesting unit study. Unfortunately, the supporting documents are not linked, so this unit would require a fair amount of teacher preparation. Also, beware of the small print at the bottom of the page: “(NOTE: This activity did not take place in our implementation of the unit due to teacher and student exhaustion at this point.)”

Thematic Units – The Summer Olympics
Lots of links that may be useful if you try one of the research projects above.

Edited to Add

Scotto offers a few Olympics Medal Math worksheets here.

Lou DiGioia, Executive Director of MathCounts, has posted an assortment of Olympics trivia: Olympics By the Numbers.
[If the article isn't at the top of the page, you'll need to scroll down for it. Can you believe the MathCounts tech people have never heard of permalinks?]

And +plus magazine tackles the question of predicting Olympic medal counts in Harder, better, faster, stronger.

Whatever you do, be sure to finish out the day by serving the Olympic dessert of champions!

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Have more fun on Let’s Play Math! blog:

• Puzzles for the New Year
• Happy Pi Day!
• Happy Pi Day, 2008!
• Planning Ahead: St. Patrick’s Day
• Christmas Math Puzzles and Activities