NAME THAT THING

Can you name it
in 5?

Five numbers. One mystery. Nothing else on the screen.

A warm-up routine for the start of class. Numbers are tossed out one at a time — bare, with no explanation — and each one narrows the field. Students guess the place or the event the numbers describe. The reveal at the end carries everything: the answer, the story, every number decoded, and the math the mystery was hiding.

▶ Play entry #1 Browse the library
Clue 1 of 5
2 hours
40 minutes
Something took this long. What? Why?
One number in — that's all you get.

Every mystery starts like this: one number, no name, no hints.

1
One bare number
A giant number and its unit. Less is more — that's the whole clue.
2
Talk, guess, revise
What kind of thing has a number like that? Each clue tests the guesses before it.
3
Reveal, then do the math
The answer, the story, every number decoded — and real math work the numbers inspire.

Zero prep: pull up an entry, go full-screen, and click through — five minutes, tops.

Pick your grade bank

Three separate banks — no repeats across grades. Each bank is built to hold 60 entries: 10 in each of the six categories below. More grades are on the way.

Now playing

Pull it up, go full-screen, and advance one clue at a time. Nothing to print, nothing to prep.

Clue 1 of 5 Grade 6 History Event Ocean Percent
Clue 1 of 5
2 hours 40 minutes
The reveal

The five numbers, decoded

    The Titanic

    The library

    Browse by category shelf, by place or event, by theme, or by the math lens you're teaching this week. Tap any card to play it.

    The six category shelves — 10 slots each in the finished bank

    Tap a shelf to filter to that category. Tap it again to show the whole bank. Empty shelves are honest slots — entries for them are in the pipeline, awaiting approval.

    Don't want to choose? Two ways to let the class decide: surprise everyone, or call on a student to pick a category.

    “Pick a category!”

    Call on a student, let them call it out, then tap their category. You'll get a random entry from that shelf in the current grade bank, straight into the player at Clue 1.

    Kind
    Theme
    Math lens

    How a round runs

    1

    One number at a time

    The teacher advances one clue per screen: a giant number and its unit — nothing else. No sentence underneath doing the thinking for anyone. Less is more is the anthem of each clue.

    2

    Guess, then revise

    After each clue, the class talks: what kind of thing has a number like that? Magnitude, units, scale. Every new number confirms some guesses and kills others — that revision is the reasoning.

    3

    The reveal does the teaching

    The final stage has everything: the answer, a photo, the story the numbers were telling, each number decoded, and one or two “do the math” tasks the mystery itself inspires — with worked answers.

    Running it as a warm-up

    • Five clues, then the reveal. Clues run from least telling to most — early numbers fit hundreds of things; late numbers fit almost nothing else.
    • Slow is the point. Let a clue sit. The thinking happens in the pause between numbers, not in the clicking.
    • Lean by design. This is a warm-up routine — the payoff is the talk, and the math waiting at the reveal.
    • End with the math. Every reveal closes with authentic math built from the entry's own numbers: a percent, a rate, a conversion, a scale factor.

    For middle school and up

    The numbers here are honest — shipwrecks, eruptions, death tolls and all — because the band can handle them, and the inference can be genuinely hard, not just cute. Clue screens hide the giveaway words on purpose: “74% · 20%” lands very differently before anyone says which group is which.

    Zero prep, for real

    Pull up an entry, tap full screen, and click through. The reveal is built in as the final stage, every number is decoded there, and every figure carries its source so a student who asks “says who?” gets a real answer.