What's the answer to this math question?

[QuestionableMouse]

It's stumped a half my nephew's class and I have no idea either 😂

Primary Teacher and nerd

Yes she’s sorted them into equal groups and unequal groups.
I’m a Year 2 teacher, I think this looks like a piece of Year 2 work- white rose as someone else mentioned, unit on multiplication and division (making equal groups is the pre-cursor of division).
If you see the question above, it is based on equal groups so that is the area the children have been working on so should hopefully be looking out for!
It is honestly really hard to teach 6-7 year olds this sort of stuff remotely like this.

It must be work leading on to multiplication. The right hand groups are all of equal size/value so you can calculate the total by doing the sum 3x3 for example. Children need to be able to work out when they can do multiplication and when they can't. The left hand groups are unequal so you can't multiply to get the answer.
Quite hard without teacher input though.

Agree with the equal and unequal groups theory. I had thought that before I read the rest of the comment.

Do they still call these Venn diagrams? No intersection though?

Set theory haunted me on and off from about 6 to University and I think I only thoroughly understood the version we had at 6. Good visual aids. We had plastic families - each family had Mum, Dad, boy, girl, granny and grandad - and there were blue, red, yellow and green family. Then you could make the groups and intersections on the floor with hula hoops and do thinks like "the set of all green people and the set of all grannies" and figure out where to put green granny.

Money well spent out of the maths budget that year!

Group 1 are prime numbers - they can only be decided by 1 or by themselves.

Group two are numbers that can be divided equally into groups of more than 1 or themselves.

@LaLaLandIsNoFun

Group 1 are prime numbers - they can only be decided by 1 or by themselves.

Group two are numbers that can be divided equally into groups of more than 1 or themselves.

Can you run that past me again, please?

She has clearly sorted them... Badly

Into shapes

Group 1 are prime numbers - they can only be decided by 1 or by themselves.

Group two are numbers that can be divided equally into groups of more than 1 or themselves.

I don't think that holds up actually.

Group 1 there are totals of 5, 7 and 11 which certainly are primes.
But group 2 has totals of 5, 8 and 9. So 5 is in each group.
And if you are looking at individual quantities rather than totals that is group 1 having 1,2 and 3 - all prime.
But group 2 also has 1, 2 and 3

I think lockdown is getting to Annie.

Don't you need to know what they were like before she started in order to know how she sorted them?

Yes, it’s just examples where each column is an exact replica of the others and examples where they are not.

My head hurts

@stonebrambleboy

My head hurts

That's how I feel in general about this sort of maths.

Isn’t it just really simple. She’s sorted all the same shapes together in each circle?

My year 2 child had something similar to this using arrays to show the difference between odd and even numbers. As with most of the work he's getting sent home at the minute, I think it's a very complicated way of teaching something fairly straightforward!

equal groups and unequal groups

As PP: All the blocks on the right have the same number (1, 1, 1, 1, 1) (2, 2, 2, 2) (3, 3, 3) and the ones on the left are mixed (2, 3, 2), (2, 2, 1), (3, 3, 3, 2)

Why did Annie leave two blocks with two 'x's in the left circle then? Surely they should go with the other identical blocks in the right hand circle....

Equal groups and unequal groups

@titchy

Why did Annie leave two blocks with two 'x's in the left circle then? Surely they should go with the other identical blocks in the right hand circle....

It's each group of adjoining blocks that are one 'thing', not the individual blocks.

It's the sets inside each circle.

Left hand circle has varied sets. The x set contains 2 twos and a 3. The heart set contains 2 twos and a one.
The right hand circle sets are all the same. Four pairs of crosses, five single triangles, and three sets of three hearts.

It's each group of adjoining blocks that are one 'thing', not the individual blocks.

Oooohhhhhhh. Good job I'm not in year 2!

Equal and unequal groups? I don't think it's as complicated as we're trying to make it.

Isn’t it just really simple. She’s sorted all the same shapes together in each circle? No, the idea isn't that she sorted within each circle. The idea is that there are sort of domino-like blocks, each one divided into 3 sections, and Annie had to sort them into two groups, one group to go in each circle. Some of the dominoes had the same number of symbols in each section, and she put all those into the right hand circle, some had different numbers of symbols in the each section, and she put all those into the left hand circle.

Do they still call these Venn diagrams? No intersection though? It's the idea of enclosing with a line all items that are in the same set which makes it a Venn diagram. If the sets are mutually exclusive, then the intersection will be empty - in this case, you can't have some thing with equal numbers of symbols in each division at the same time as having unequal numbers, so nothing's going to belong to both sets, so the intersection is empty.