Lesson Plan: Cryptarithmetic Mathematics
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to solve cryptarithmetic puzzles, in which numeric digits are replaced by letters of the alphabet.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- solve cryptarithmetic puzzles in the form of integer addition calculations in which digits are consistently and uniquely replaced with letters of the alphabet, none of the numbers represented include leading zeros, and the resulting representation of the calculation includes rows of meaningful, related words,
- solve subtraction cryptarithmetic puzzles by rearranging them into addition calculations.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- column addition of integers,
- algebraic representation of numbers in problems.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- other types of letter substitution puzzles, for example, those involving multiplication or division of cryptic representations of numbers,
- puzzles in which multiple letters are used to represent the same numeric digit,
- puzzles that have numbers that include leading zeros in them,
- creating puzzles of their own.
