A Guide To Learning All About Prime Numbers

This week in Te Ngahere we have been learning all about prime numbers and factors. When we tried out factors and prime numbers we were given an activity that involves both factors and prime numbers. With the activity we were given there was a shoelace factory that had one hundred machines. These machines are what they use to stretch out the shoe laces, each lace comes ten cm long and once it goes through a machine it’s multiplied by that number(eg: once a lace goes through the number 5 machine it becomes 50 cm). One day in the factory they were given an urgent order for a pair of shoes that required the laces to go through the number 6 machine but the machine was broken so they instead used the 2 and 3 machine to make six. After this day the boss of the company realised they did not need the number 6 machine. Our task was to figure out which other machines were unnecessary in the company. Here is my DLO I created to show how I worked this problem out. I personally found this easy but one difficult part of it was actually trying to find the prime numbers because we had to check that they had no other factors. Have you ever tried factors or prime numbers for maths before?