Playlist: Bookmarks
Back to School: Rewriting The Beatles’ “Help!”
Can your students come up with a one-syllable word to sum up their time away from school? And then rewrite The Beatles’ song Help!?
Chess Variant: Monster Chess
What if you had really weak chess pieces, but you could always move twice?
Racetrack – Race Around A Graph
How fast do you get your mathematical car going without crashing?
Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game
Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?
Microchess (Chess Variant)
What if we played chess on a board that’s only 4×5?
Charge of the Light Brigade – Chess Variant
What if one side played with THREE QUEENS and the other had SEVEN KNIGHTS!? What if?
Horde Chess Variant
What if one player had, say, 32 pawns?
Four Player Chess
Tired of boring ol’ chess? Then you need to try FOUR PLAYER chess!
A Lunar Survival Mission
A favorite of mine! This task is delightfully complex and ambiguous, forcing students to make choices without enough information and with no right answer. How will they survive on the moon for three days?
Cram
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!
Game: Number Scrabble
What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!
Game: Snakes
In this grid-based strategy game, who will be the last to add to the snake?
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
Math Game: Heaps
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!
SCAMPER: Scaffolding Creativity
Asking students to “think creatively” won’t get you far. They won’t know how to start, they’ll get stuck with simple ideas, or they’ll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
Ghost
Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.
Col – A Strategy Game
The first person to run out of regions loses in this strategy game.
Dots and Boxes
Who can make the most boxes from dots in this strategy game?
Sprouts
Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.
How to Play Go
Ready to learn a 2,500-year-old Chinese board game? Let’s… Go!
The Game of 100
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?