Geometrical Dodgeball

I am not the worlds greatest geometry teacher. In fact I am not the best in the school that I teach at.

One thing I dislike about teach geometry are the number of theorems and how old school geometry is in the way of teaching it. I know I hear it coming already about patty paper and all the things you can do with it, but it's not the same. There is no real life situation when you have to know the Central angle theorem. 

One thing I have been trying to do more of is getting students outside and playing games. Right now we are learning about polyhedra and their surface area and volume. Right now we are trying to remember the names of different polyhedra with different sides, triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, etc. Some students remember it from 7th and 8th grade, but those have become high school standards now in Nebraska. The way we learned this was by playing two groups of geometrical dodgeball, we played this outside, but would work much better in a gym.


The way the game is played is everyone is assigned a number and stands in a circle, one person throws the ball up into the air and calls out a number, when that person touches it they yell stop. All players stop and they get 2 free jumps to get closer. If they get hit, they are out, if it is caught or misses the thrower is out.

The way I mathematized it was at the beginning of the round they had to name the polygon they formed if someone was out and named it first they got to jump back in. I played it with two groups outside and worked well since there were shortened periods.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds fun - I'd love to see a video!

    I've done geometric charades before that sound similar. Teams write names of shapes of shapes and properties (hexagon with 2 right angles, for example), the clue giver draws a shape and positions their teammates &/or teammates hands to make the shape, until it is guessed. Usually everyone holds a rope, so just the number of vertices don't give it away.

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    1. I like that a lot. It would help reinforce vocabulary from that section too on things like vertices and edges!

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