Quinn Loves Math

So we went to the HISD Career Fair this weekend (Quinn was a Career Consultant for her job, but that is a different story). One of the tables was a Math table. It wasn't really a career, just a "Math is cool" table.

At this table there was a wide range of math problems. Quinn impressed the facilitator.  Totally on her own and without prodding she spent about 30 minutes doing math brain teasers, most of which were "above her grade."

Some of the problems that she solved, with minimal coaching really about what the problem was asking, not the math part of it.... were

• A 3x3 grid of squares, where you count the number of squares (14 is the answer)
• Drawing a single continuous line without backtracking to draw a shape
• Solving the algebra problem for "A":   8-A = A
• There a 3 frogs. Frog A takes 7 hops. Frog B takes 5 hops less then Frog A. Frog C takes the same same number of hops as Frog A and Frog B together. How many hops did all of the frogs take. (18 is the answer)

The final problem was "on a computer game, Harry got 378 points and Devon got 1020 points. Harry got how many fewer points than Devon? 

Brock was ready to move on, but Quinn was pretty close to getting this using the math tricks that she had been learning.... 

And just for reference, she is still in the first grade.