Pupils explore how adding a number to its reverse and repeating until you get a palindrome provides us with some interesting questions about the sequences produced.

IMPORTANT: the video is not introductory, but you may wish to play it after pupils have completed the A3 investigation.

Column addition.

1. Read the attached teacher sheet. You may identify points you wish to clarify for your pupils beforehand.

2. IMPORTANT: in section 2 you will need to decide how to shorten the process. Starting with the number 286 pupils will need to perform the process 23 times to reach the palindrome 8,813,200,023,188. This can be fun if turned into a race between pupils, but 23 iterations is too many with the size of number they need to deal with. As such, you need to decide how to shorten this section for your group - again see numbers on the attached teacher sheet.

3. After that pupils can work through at their own pace, and you may wish to play the introductory video after completion of the task.