With the World Cup Final rapidly approaching and SATs out of the way, what better way to spend a maths lesson than looking at the possibility of England meeting Brazil in the final?
With a predicted score of 5 all, after extra time, the task is to try and work out how many possible different scores there could have been during the game.
Of course there are lots of possibilities but to start with the score must have been 0 – 0. Then England could have scored to make it 1 – 0 or Brazil could have scored to make it 0 – 1.
As it is such a big task it would be a good idea to break it down into smaller tasks eg firstly work out all the possible scores up to a score of 1 – 1. Then work out all the possible scores up to 2 – 2. and so on. Done in this way there are plenty of opportunities to spot patterns, including square numbers.
Extension could go to even higher scores!