This maths murder mystery is a great revision task. Use it with a whole class to cover key algebra topics. This includes expanding single brackets, substitution, nth term and solving equations.

You can make the questions easier or more challenging to suit different classes and abilities. There’s also an extension task included to keep all the students busy.

Maths murder mystery set-up

Ant and Dec couldn’t believe what they had discovered. The secret they had just learnt about a certain celebrity’s private life was unbelievable. They just had to make it public knowledge – it was just too juicy to keep to themselves.

They confronted the celeb but were warned to keep their big mouths shut. But the celebrity decided they couldn’t take any chances. Later that week, Ant and Dec were found poisoned in their dressing room.

When police arrived on the scene, they found six celebrities lurking around, but who is the guilty one? Your job is to find out who did it!

Does their alibi check out?

All the suspects have an alibi. They claim they were in local schools, teaching kids how to expand brackets. Police gave each suspect an expression to expand.

Find out who expanded their brackets correctly and was being truthful about their whereabouts.

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