Using Games to Practice Thinking

We miss a huge opportunity if we merely play games, but never use those games as a way to move students toward higher levels of thinking as well as abstraction.

Here’s the framework I would use:

• Introduce a simple game (say, The Game of 100 or Heaps).
• Allow students to play through a few times; long enough to get the hang of the rules. On Bloom’s we’d be at Remember/Understand
• Then, ask them to start looking for patterns. What sorts of sequences lead to victory/defeat? This would be the Analyze level of Bloom’s.
• Use those patterns to formulate a strategy to follow. Perhaps write a one-sentence goal. (In chess, “Control the center of the board” or “Never move backwards.”) This would be the Synthesize level.
• Most of the games I’ve written about have simple enough rules that you can make small modifications. Change something about how the game is played.
  • The Game of 100 can become The Game of 77.
  • Heaps can change to have 5 piles.
• Now, students can play the modified game and see how their strategy works/fails. How could they adapt their previous strategy to work under the new rules? Students are getting more abstract in their thinking.
• Could we find certain strategies that work across games? In both chess and tic-tac-toe, it’s beneficial to control the center of the board. Is that true in other games as well?

In this way, playing games becomes practice for higher-level, abstract thinking.