Math Taboo Game

Pretty sure I lied to my algebra students when I announced abruptly, "Let's play this game. It's a lot of fun!"

I had never played the game before as I just thought of it when I spoke the words. (They were doing polynomial factoring and were being so nice and quiet. I can't stand "nice and quiet" in my math class, so I had to disrupt them and wanted to play a game.)

I thought of playing Taboo using math vocabulary. In case you're not familiar with it, the object of the game is get your teammate to say a certain word on the card without using the "taboo" words. For example, describe VEAL without using the words CALF, YOUNG, PARMIGIANA, CUTLET, BOX.

My instructions:

1. Take out a piece of paper, fold it into quarters and tear neatly so you have 4 small pieces of paper.

2. Open up your math book and look for vocabulary words that we've covered already.

3. At the top of each piece of paper, write a word (or phrase) that you want people to describe, box this word up.

4. Then underneath this word, write 4 taboo words that the describer may not use.

5. Don't share what you're doing, wouldn't be fun if others saw what you wrote.

6. I need each person to complete 4 of these.

7. When done, fold each piece of paper exactly in half — like this (you have to show them) — and drop them all in this bucket.

A few simple rules:

1. Class is divided into 2 teams, Team X and Team Y.

2. Team X goes first: one person from Team X comes up to front, reaches into bucket to get one slip of paper and has 60 seconds to describe as many words as possible to the teammates.

3. Teacher stands next to the describer to make sure none of the taboo words or the main word itself is said — round is over if this happens.

4. Skipping a word is not allowed.

5. Hand gestures are okay (one describer today put his arms out in parallel fashion to get his teammates to say "perpendicular" — who's his math teacher?

6. Teacher reserves the right to help out whichever team she likes better.

So, yeah, we had a ton of fun. It was the last period of the day, and they didn't want to leave when the bell rang!

This went so well that I'll make a "real" game out of this. I'll print the words onto mailing labels. Then I can stick them on the back of playing cards so they are shuffle-able.

A Lazy Teacher's Version of Block Game

I love the "Block" game that my colleague Erin has shared with me. Erin found it at Maria Anderson's post. It looked familiar, turned out it was one of Elizabeth's #made4math posts.

There's just this one BIG problem: I dread making games that require a bunch of little game pieces!!

Erin must have spent hours typing up the 36 math expressions for the distributive game, wrote the 36 answers on the back, made 18 copies — for 36 kids to play in pairs — and cut each copy into 36 little game pieces. I felt bad using them because I didn't help at all.

Whenever I borrow stuff I'm extra careful with it, so I kept reminding my kids to be gentle with the pieces, to not lose any of them, to not write on them, and don't even breathe on them!

Because the algebra kids really liked the game, I thought, Okay, I'm going to make one for order-of-operations for my 6th graders! I lasted all of five minutes.

Then an idea popped into my head that requires NO GAME PIECES AT ALL!!

I made two changes:

1. Instead of a blank 4x9-grid game board, I number the spaces from 1 to 36.

2. Instead of typing up 36 questions and 36 answers (photocopied back-to-back) and cutting them out, I use KUTA to generate a worksheet with 36 questions — takes 1 minute. KUTA also automatically generates the answers. I print the questions and answers back-to-back.

So, this would be all that is needed for two players:

• 1 game board

• 2 worksheets (36 questions in front, 36 answers in back) — one for each person

• 2 different game markers

You can put the game boards and worksheets into plastic sleeves — or laminate them — to protect and re-use them. I'm just going to protect the game boards but leave the worksheets as consumables, this way kids can write on them to do their math work.

The game is similar to tic-tac-toe 4-in-a-row. Maria's directions in pdf.

Yes, kids can cheat in this game because the answers are in the back of the worksheet or in the back of each game piece. But I make it clear that each person needs to show his work to the opponent.

Cheaters cheat themselves. I don't care.

Math Teachers' Circle

Last Monday morning I was on a SuperShuttle from SFO to the Creekside Inn. But I was running a little late, so the driver took me straight to the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM). I was expecting a tall building with lots of glass windows — instead the driver stopped here.

I was at AIM to attend a one-week workshop on How to Run a Math Teachers’ Circle. I stumbled upon this opportunity simply by doing a search for a Circle that I could be a participant in. But there wasn't one in my area that I knew of, hence my always-ambitious-but-never-know-what-the-hell-I'm-getting-myself-into evil twin said, Why don't you start one?

I asked Erin, my next-door math colleague, to join me. She and I fulfilled the requirement for "two middle school math teachers" — we just needed to find "two mathematicians and one administrator or organizer" to make a team of five.

I contacted Brianna Donaldson, AIM's Director of Special Projects, to help us round out the team. Within the week, she hooked us up with Nate and Hala, both are math professors at Cal Lutheran. We still needed a fifth member, so I asked Melissa, another math colleague (there are only 3 of us at our junior high) — she graciously got on board.

Needless to say I was thrilled to hear that our team was chosen among many (like hundreds of thousands of teams) to receive full funding to participate in this workshop.Below is a summary of my week in beautiful Palo Alto, California. (For some reason it's easier for me to write in present tense when I recount a story — maybe it's an ELD or ESL thing.)

Monday

I meet the other two members of our team for the first time, Nate and Hala. I've seen their pictures online, and they look the same — thank God!There are six teams: 2 from Texas, 1 Kansas, 1 New York (Rochester), and 2 California.

Josh Zucker appears first on the agenda, "Introduction to Problem Solving." I've always wanted to meet Josh — his name appears on most of the cool math problems that I first encountered at the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival in Los Angeles. Turns out he's the director.

He facilitates this classic problem:

The numbers 1 through 100 are written on the board. You choose any two numbers x and yand erase them, writing xy + x + y in their place. You continue to do this until one number remains. What are the possible values for that remaining number?

I just want to post the problems here without further discussions on them so that you — the thinker, the mathematician, the teacher, the student, the problem solver — get to struggle with the problem and construct meaning for yourself.

There are three things that happen consistently each day, so I'll just mention them once here:

1. We get two hours (TWO HOURS!!) for lunch as the nearby restaurants are about a 15-minute walk away.

2. After lunch, we work within our group on logistics and fundraising to run our own math circle.

3. "Happy Hour" greets us at the end of each session, if we wish to stay.

Tuesday

Tatiana Shubin is a math professor at San Jose State University; she presents Grid Power. I've always required my students to use quadrille-ruled composition notebooks to take notes and such, but after hearing Tatiana speak, I want my kiddos to do ALL their math work on grid paper!

Tatiana gives us this delightful problem:

How many squares are there in a 7 x 7 square?

Paul Zeitz introduces us to "Mathematical Games." He's a math professor at the University of San Francisco and is taking a sabbatical this year. I've ALWAYS wanted to buy the book The Art and Craft of Problem Solving — lo and behold, Paul is the author! But Paul doesn't once mention his book. (I made the connection after the workshop was over.) Instead he recommends James Tanton's Solve This. I need these books.

Two of the games we work on:

Takeaway. A set of 16 pennies is placed on the table. Two players take turns removing pennies. At each turn, a player must remove between 1 and 4 pennies (inclusive). The winner is the last player to make a legal move.

Puppies and Kittens, aka Wythoff's Nim. We start with a pile of kittens and puppies. Two players take turns; a legal move is removing any number of puppies or any number of kittens or an equal number of both puppies and kittens. The winner is the last player to make a legal move.

I really like how Paul keeps track of winning/losing moves as oasis/desert points on a horizontal line. So with the two variables like in Puppies and Kittens, we use a coordinate plane instead to record.

Wednesday

Diana White is a math professor at the University of Colorado Denver. Diana facilitates us through the Exploding Dots problem. (James Tanton owns the dots.)

Say you have a machine that holds ping pong balls. If you put three balls in the far right slot, they'll explode and two balls will move one space left into the next slot. Like this:

This happens with any set of three balls in one slot, therefore the explosion continues until there are fewer than three balls per slot. Thus, starting with 9 ping pong balls, the result looks like this:

Tom Davis is a retired math professor; he walks us through Conway's Rational Tangles. I don't even know how to begin to explain and illustrate this problem. It requires four students and two long ropes — each student holding one end of a rope. The task is to do two (and only two) commands of "twist" and "rotate" to tangle up the ropes — the challenge then is to untangle the ropes in a systematic way that involves arithmetic with positive and negative fractions. Okay, my explanation is as clear as mud.

The point is it is a wonderful activity that kids and teachers will absolutely love to get their hands on, literally. The other point is I'm better than you because I have the two ropes. See?

Thursday

Paul Zeitz is back this morning with "How to Gamble If You Must." We play a few dice games, then we work on Two Lottery Tickets:

It costs a consumer $1 to buy a Klopstockia lottery ticket. The buyer then scratches the ticket to see the prize. Compute, to the nearest penny, the expected profit that the state of Klopstockia makes per ticket sold, given the following scenarios for prizes awarded. (The state will make a profit if the expected value to the lottery ticket is less than $1.)

Friday

There is no math activity on our last day. Each team has 10 minutes to present the how/what/where/when of their own future Math Teachers' Circle. We each get a T-shirt and our team pictures taken. We bid farewell at noon.

I'm grateful to everyone who made this workshop possible. And I love my team!! So I lied about us being chosen among hundreds of thousands. I had never drank so much wine in one week. I took two wine corks home to practice a trick Josh had taught us. Please consider joining a Math Teachers' Circle in your area. Our team leads the Thousand Oaks MTC and would love to have you. (I'm working on our website.) We owe it to our students to make math engaging and accessible.