Maths · Averages & Spread
Fair Share Machine
5 classmates stacked up their reading tokens into towers. Time to make sense of the piles.
Free to use and free to share. There is no sign-up, no score, and nothing a child does here is recorded or sent anywhere. What you may do with it, in full.
Loading the interactive exercise. Nothing you do here is saved or scored.
Why this works
Sharing the blocks out equally leaves every tower at 5 - that levelled height IS the mean , shared between 5). The height that appears most often is 3: that is the mode.
Helping a child through Fair Share Machine
It runs in 2 steps
- 1. Share it out. Move blocks between the towers until every tower is the same height.
- 2. Find the crowd. Tap every tower that shares the most common height.
Hints, least revealing first
- Nothing is added or taken away - blocks only ever move from one tower to another.
- The mean is the height every tower reaches once the sharing is fair.
- Median means middle, mode means most, range means the gap from shortest to tallest.
When they finish it: “Sorted!”
11+ skill this exercise practises
It has its own page, with a worked example on it.
All maths 11+ skillsYou can reuse this. Here is exactly how far that goes
Tutors, teachers and editors keep asking, so this is the answer in writing rather than by email. You do not need to ask permission, and you do not need to tell us.
- Embed it
- Put the exercise inside your own page with the code above. It stays playable, and it keeps working when we improve the engine behind it.
- Print it
- Print the page, or print the exercise off the screen, and hand out the copies. No limit on how many.
- Use it in class
- One child or a full set, in a school, in a tutoring session, in a homework club, or at the kitchen table.
- Put it in something you charge for
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- Quote it, rewrite it, translate it, cut it up, or build something different on top of it. Treat the wording, the worked examples and the question ideas as yours to work with.
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Embed this exercise
Paste this into your own page and the exercise runs there, playable, for your readers or your students. It is 900 pixels tall by default and as wide as the column you put it in; change the height if your layout wants a different one.
The embedded copy has no header, no footer and no sign-up prompt. It records nothing about the child using it, on your page just as on ours.
Fair Share Machine practises one skill. Maths has 55 of them
A free diagnostic covers every maths skill and the other three subjects, and comes back with a shortlist rather than a list.