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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.

Table tiling

This task is designed to assess how well students understand tessellation, area, and patterns.

A square table top is to be tiled using three types of tile:

  • Square
  • Half a square (cut along the diagonal)
  • Quarter of a square (half of a ‘half’ tile)

A design is shown for a 20 cm square table. Students must calculate how many of each type of tile is needed to cover larger tables. Using their results they are required to give a method for how the tiles needed could be calculated for any size of table.

This task is from the Mathematics Assessment Resource Service, a collaboration between UC Berkeley and the Shell Centre team at the University of Nottingham. A full rubric is given for the task, together with examples of student work and suggestions for helping students overcome misconceptions. Further information on the collection is given here.

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