This year for Halloween, we've created some new spooky puzzles to hone your maths skills - from counting and pattern recognition, to logical thinking and code cracking.
Halloween Code Cracker
The punchlines to five spooky jokes have been encrypted as secret messages, using Pigpen Cipher. Can you crack the code?
You can also have a go at encrypting your own secret messages, using our Cryptography resource developed by the Open University, with five different ciphers to choose from.
In our Spooky Sudoku, use your pattern recognition and logical thinking skills to complete the seasonal patterns. Cut out the symbols and place them on the grid so that you have one of each symbol in every row, column and 2x2, 2x3 or 3x3 block. There are three different levels of difficulty to choose from.
Four friends are going out guising* together for Halloween. Use the clues to work out who is wearing which costume, and what each friend will be performing. In the advanced version of the puzzle, you also need to work out what each person's favourite halloween treat is.
* Guising is the Scottish Halloween tradition of children dressing up in disguises (costumes) and performing songs, jokes, or tricks at people’s houses in exchange for treats.
I-Spy Counting Puzzle
Get ready for some seasonal counting fun! How many of each of spooky symbol can you find? For a bonus activity, colour in each symbol with a different colour.
And for even more Halloween puzzle fun, here's our geometric bat puzzle from a couple of years ago. For this simple but fun geometric puzzle activity, cut out shapes from black paper and challenge kids to create a bat out of them.
We love to see people doing our activities, so feel free to share photos of your spooky puzzles on Facebook or Bluesky with the hashtag #MathsWeekScot and tag us in!
We've pulled together all our seasonal resources from the last three years, and thrown in a few new ones too, so that you can create your own Christmas Holiday Countdown depending on age, ability and preferences. With games, puzzles, art and craft activities to choose from, as well as our interactive puzzle mystery story.
To celebrate Book Week Scotland, we are delighted to announce the finalists and winners of our Maths Tales 2025 story-writing competition, run in partnership with Read Write Count with The First Minister.
