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Letter Wheel
A series of wheels are shown that are in perfect ‘non-slip’ contact with their neighbours and driven by a first wheel. The diameter of each wheel is given. The final wheel has letters evenly spaced around its edge and the challenge is to determine the letter that will be at a particular point after 69 revolutions of the driving wheel.
The investigation provides an opportunity to show a key element of problem solving by looking at a simplified system of two wheels and learning from this. The piece of mathematics that is most useful in solving the problem is proportional reasoning applied to the diameters of the wheels.
There are ‘Scratch’ computer programs available as supporting files to both demonstrate the situation and to provide further examples for investigation.
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Downloads
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Letter Wheel: presentation 386.49 KB
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Letter Wheel: support files 610.13 KB
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Letter Wheel: printable resource 1.64 MB
Show downloads
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Letter Wheel: presentation 386.49 KB -
Letter Wheel: support files 610.13 KB -
Letter Wheel: printable resource 1.64 MB
Download all files as a .zip2.37 MB
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