Down to Two

My three person senior IB class has shrunk again - now we are down to two!  In some ways this class is a dream come true - two highly motivated, very gifted students who will tackle any problem that I throw at them.  Unfortunately I'm rather rusty on the advanced math, so trying to find some interesting problems that supplement the curriculum is proving to be a challenge.

We're zipping through the curriculum, so last Friday we took a break and spent the period figuring out winning strategies for various simple games, including Nim and a variation of tic-tac-toe.  (In a simple variation of Nim, two players take turns taking 1 or 2 stones from a pile of 20 stones.  The last person to take a stone wins.)  Unfortunately my students decided that now that they know how to force a win in each of these games, they can start hustling people!  They may be my only students who see how what I teach them actually applies to real life!