Adventure Games, Permutations and Spreadsheets-by Paul Vodola

Puzzles have long been a source of motivation for the exploration of mathematical concepts, theory, and computation. Multimedia adventure games with creative storylines, movies, sophisticated graphics, and sound, are the modern context for both new and classic puzzles. We will show how some of these puzzles can be modeled with directed graphs and the resulting mathematical work can be carried out with nothing more than a computer spreadsheet.