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Ganita Prakash · Grade 8 · Chapter 1

A Square and a Cube

Queen Ratnamanjuri's locker puzzle, worked into five hands-on labs. Toggle, build, guess, and check — the ideas stick better when your hands do them.

01

The 100-Locker Puzzle

Person k toggles every k-th locker. Run all 100 people through, one at a time, or jump straight to the end. Watch which lockers survive open — and why.

Person 0 of 100
closed open (perfect square!) dot = perfect square number
02

Square Builder

Every square is a stack of consecutive odd numbers. Drag the slider and watch the L-shaped layers get added, one odd number at a time.

5² = 25
03

Cube Builder

A cube of side n is n layers, each a square of n × n unit cubes. Slide n and watch the tower grow — layer by layer, exactly n³ little cubes.

3³ = 27
3 layers of 3 × 3 = 9 unit cubes each
04

Square Root Estimator

Pick any number. Guess its square root by narrowing between the nearest perfect squares — the same "halve the interval" trick from page 9.

05

Perfect Square / Cube Checker

Type a number to see its prime factorisation, and whether the factors split into two identical groups (square) or three (cube).