Interactive Jumping Puzzle

In this period where I’m not in the classroom, I’m trying to keep myself busy with a few little projects. One of those things is working on updating my coding skills by creating interactive activities using Javascript.

The first of these is a simple puzzle where the aim is to switch the positions of the two sets of counters by jumping them over each other. If it seems familiar, that may be because I posted about using this puzzle in class in 2014. (Or it may just be that this is a fairly well known puzzle). That post has more information about how I related the puzzle to a nice quadratic relationship, and used it to explore distributing and factoring*.

The puzzle is embedded below, but the full version of the puzzle will be more useful for using in class. It explains the rules of the puzzle more clearly, and includes options to change the counters into higher contrast (for those that find that useful) or into cute little frogs (which is far less useful).

I want to continue to find the time to keep working on little interactives that will (might) be useful to use in the classroom. My next project involves visualizing Riemann approximations. Hopefully I’ll be able to upload that one soon.

* That is, expanding and factorising if you’re in Australia. I figure that if I’m in the US now, I need to start using the appropriate terminology.

3 Replies to “Interactive Jumping Puzzle”

  1. Thank you very much for creating this little program! I have been doing this problem for many years, using red and blue Bingo chips and a rectangle of boxes drawn on a sheet of paper. I absolutely love this, especially at a time when we are doing so much online!

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