The puzzle is a good example of pseudocontext: "Instead of giving students realistic situations that they could analyze, textbook authors began to fill books w

The puzzle is a good example of pseudocontext: "Instead of giving students realistic situations that they could analyze, textbook authors began to fill books with make-believe contexts – contexts that students were meant to believe but for which they should not use any of their real-world knowledge."[0] I think for a math puzzle that people choose to do for fun, pseudocontext is fine. We can suspend our disbelief and engage with the math as it's intended to be engaged with. In a classroom setting, on the other hand, I think it's best to stay away from pseudocontext. Either make the context realistic, make it clearly fantastical, or just use math as the context without trying to dress it up in real-life details. Pseudocontext in a teaching environment is problematic because it requires learners to ignore the common-sense reasoning that they'd apply to a real-life problem and it reinforces the impression that math has nothing to do with the real world. In this case, we could call it a dragon egg and that would be enough I think to transform it into a fantasy context, since nobody has preexisting assumptions about how durable a dragon's egg might be. [0] https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2010/pseudocontext-saturdays-introduction/ https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2010/pseudocontext-saturdays-introd...