Codename: Numbers

The 2016 game of the year was Codenames, but for Christmas my wife and I were given Codenames Pictures, which is an equally awesome game. The basic gameplay is that you have a partner or a group where one person gives a one word clue and a number which correlates to how many it is suppose to cover, the first one to get them all wins.  There are neutral ones and one is an assassin which ends the game.

My thought: How cool would this be if you did this with numbers.

If I made board pieces that had a bunch of different numbers, students would use one word such as: even, odd, cubic, etc... this game would help build number sense.  Since you could play it with groups of 4 it would be a great station activity.

More to come with actual student gameplay.

Drawing a Circle

Can you draw a perfect circle?

I know that I couldn't, but with help from a SmartBoard game it became easier and my students loved to draw circles on the Smartboard for a great end of the year activity.

I had students put their name with their high score and by the end of the day we had a leaderboard and by the second day students were inching closer to my high score.  (Yes, I did practice for 2 hours to beat some of my students.)

It was a great competition to get students engaged and motivated in the classroom.  I hate to see teachers only using a SmartBoard as a presentation tool, it is there for students to use and manipulate.  I had some students up there for 20 minutes trying to get the tips and tricks down and finally making the leaderboard.

Check out the game here: Circle Drawing

Some of my students didn't know what the cat was there for, but it is a great reminder to tell the students how close they are to 100% like a badge.  If the students do poor enough, they get an angry cat that all the students laughed at.

Design your Lesson around a Game

I was in a global math department "hangout" the other day.  One of the teachers presenting provided a great professional development opportunity for teachers to take to their teams and get feedback from students on how their lesson went.

The professional development looks like this:

go to a charity shop, find a game, design a lesson around it.

The teacher who presented found a game at a charity shop that was Marble Run.  A marble takes turns round and round and the students had to find the plot the graph for distance vs. time.  This is a great graphing stories, an extension of this activity is having students create posters with the plots.

This shows that any teacher can go out and design a lesson around a game they find for cheap.  I have found many other teachers using these same ideas for using games around the classroom.

What games do you use in the classroom?  Do you think you could use a game around a lesson next week?  Could you do this with the faculty you work with?

Check out global math department videos here: https://www.bigmarker.com/GlobalMathDept