Thursday, December 5, 2013

Games and Math

I have long had a little bit of an obsession with logic games.  Since I was young, I was 'forced' (read: tactically convinced) to try them out.  This definitely sprung from my aunt and uncle who were both teachers and had engaged themselves in teaching the entire spectrum of students.

This interest keeps itself ingrained in my life and surfaced once again with the wonderful trend that was sudoku.  I collect the puzzle everyday form the paper here at work and keep a nice pile that now goes back to 2011 for those rainy days.  I am always on the lookout for a newer, different, perhaps more interesting/challenging type of logic game, and have even recreated some as emergency lessons or as intros to try and foster the critical logical thinking in my students.  The 2 that I have now challenged other with are Yubotu and Nonograms (which may commonly be called Pix-A-Pic).  I stumbled upon this beauty at a small town bookstore and have trying them ever since.  The main creator that I have found is Conceptis Puzzles, but there are plenty to be found online

Both have a similar type of goal, that is to determine what spaces in a grid need to be filled in.  Yubotu more resembles a pen and paper battleship, while the other often creates a pixelated image.  I enjoy challenging my students to try them without any trial and error and guessing and show them how there are many ways to attack a problem, while working through it logically.  Students are always going to play games, why wouldn't they, it's much more fun that work.  The trick is to get them to be working their brain and not just clicking away aimlessly.

In the end, it's something extra that isn't a specific curriculum expectation, by the transferable skills they develop should stay with them much longer.

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