Each set includes three intentionally sequenced problems. The first is designed to be the most approachable and helps students enter the mathematics. The second asks students to organize relationships or constraints more carefully. The third is the most extending and is meant to surface structure that is not immediately obvious.
February focus: Multiple Representations
February’s Magma Mondays focus on how students organize information to make sense of a problem. This is not about choosing a representation because it looks nice. It is about choosing a representation that helps reveal structure.
In these problems, students may need to decide how to group information, track repeated changes, or reorganize quantities before calculating anything. Different representations can lead students to notice different patterns, relationships, or shortcuts.
The problems this month are designed so that guessing or calculating step by step is inefficient. Students are more successful when they pause and organize what is happening.This might look like grouping values, building a table, or rewriting the situation in a simpler form. In other cases, it might look like pairing terms, separating totals, or tracking changes over time.
The goal is not that students all use the same representation. The goal is that representations help students see something important about the mathematics in the problem.
Example Magma Monday problem
In the high school example above, students analyze how a game score changes over many rounds. This is not about computing each round. The math is about recognizing how changes repeat and how grouping those changes reveals a simpler structure. Students who organize the information strategically are able to solve the problem efficiently and explain why their approach works.
Launching a February Problem
Give students quiet time to read and think before working
Ask students how they might organize the information in the problem
Invite students to share different ways of keeping track of what is happening
Hold off on validating methods early. Let structure emerge through discussion
Later this month, we will share classroom examples showing how students organized information in different ways and how those choices supported deeper reasoning and discussion.
Magma Mondays are designed to help students see that doing mathematics is not just about getting an answer. It is about deciding how to structure a situation so the mathematics becomes visible.