Using Maths Games During Remote Learning

It was late March when schools in my local area (Melbourne, Australia) began to shut down.  Facing a rising number of COVID-19 cases, our government decided to declare an early start to the school holidays.  When term two began in the middle of April, schools were essentially closed to the general population of students, with only the children of essential workers allowed to attend.  This meant that teachers in Melbourne joined many of their colleagues from across the globe in making the rapid switch to remote learning.     

For me personally, this swift adoption of virtually delivered learning was somewhat problematic.  As an education consultant who does most of his work in classrooms, many of my immediate bookings were either cancelled or postponed.  With some extra time on my hands, I began thinking about what I could contribute to help the teachers and students that I usually work with.  It was around this time that I noticed photos popping up in the social media accounts of well-meaning parents sitting their kids down in front of maths textbooks, with accompanying posts about the beginning of their remote learning journeys.   

When I am working with educators, one of the messages that I consistently preach is the need to make mathematics education engaging.  And perhaps the best way to create disengaged maths students is to have them work their way through a textbook.  Mathematics is about understanding the world around us.  Therefore, students learn maths best by interacting with their environment, not by having a textbook placed in front of them. 

To my mind, one of the most productive activities that students could undertake during remote learning was playing maths games.  Asking students to spend time at home playing games has several benefits- some more obvious than others.  Firstly, games are perhaps the most engaging way for students to develop fluency with basic facts.  In order for students to become fluent, they need to devote substantial time to practise whatever skill they are working on.  For example, if a student is trying to learn all of the multiplication facts up to 10 x 10, they are much more likely to enjoy playing Target Os and Xs (see below) than they are working on a worksheet filled with column upon column of multiplication equations.  The more enjoyable the activity or task assigned, the more likely that students will spend longer periods of time engaged with it. 

There are many reasons why games have been identified as having a positive impact on student engagement, including the fact that in most cases they incorporate a social element, as you are playing against another person.  Therefore, informal conversations, jokes, trash talk, and words of encouragement may all feature while you are playing, helping to create a relaxed mood amongst students.  Many students also enjoy the competitive element of games, happily losing themselves in strategic thinking, while still constantly practising whatever maths skills are incorporated into the design of the game. 

Another important benefit of maths games is that they are interactive, allowing one player to observe the other’s thinking while playing (Bay-Williams & Kling, 2014).  It is amazing to see the profound impact that this can have on the ability of students to learn and apply computation strategies.  Throughout my teaching career, I have seen many students rapidly learn new strategies through the simple act of playing a well-designed game with a more proficient peer. 

One final benefit of using maths games during remote learning is that they can help illustrate the value of a strategies approach to learning basic facts, as opposed to a more traditional, memorisation approach.  There have been many studies conducted over the years that compare the two approaches and all of them have found that teaching students to think flexibly via a strategies-based approach leads to better student outcomes (Bay-Williams & Kling, 2019).  Despite this evidence, many families understandably favour the memorisation approach, as it matches the way they learnt when they were at school and is thus the method they are most comfortable with.  Playing maths games can help parents/families see first-hand that there is more than one way to work out the solution to an equation.  And hopefully, through watching the way their children approach questions, there can be a growing appreciation for the strategies approach to learning basic facts. 

I decided that one simple step I could take was to film some of my favourite maths games that I had learnt over the years and share them via my YouTube channel.  When it came to selecting which games to use, I tried to follow three basic principles.  Firstly, each game needed to have a simple structure.  I knew that a large proportion of my audience was going to be students and parents, rather than teachers.  Therefore, the games needed to have simple structures and rules, as anything that was overly complicated was likely to not be played.  Secondly, the materials needed to play each game had to be objects that were likely to be found in most households.  In instances where this was not the case, for example games that needed ten-sided dice, we were always sure to suggest an alternative that families could use.  And finally, each game had to allow for easy differentiation (Russo, Russo & Bragg, 2018).  I wanted teachers to be able to suggest the same game to their entire class.  However, for this to occur, I needed to make sure there were opportunities provided to easily modify the games, either to raise or lower the level of challenge. 

My final dilemma was who was going to be my opponent in these videos.  I initially asked my eldest son Nash to film some with me, as he was already familiar with many of the games from playing them together over the years.  He quickly showed that his place in the project was invaluable, as he was a living, breathing student who could provide the audience with excellent examples of the types of questions that can be asked and the different strategies that might be used when playing the various games.  Nash proved to be very good at thinking aloud, making it easy for the audience to “get inside his head” and understand what he was doing.  In fact, based on the feedback we have received from many teachers and parents, the authentic interactions that take place between Nash and me have at times proven to be more valuable than the games themselves. 

My goals when we started were modest.  We planned to film and upload a new game each day.  I thought that this bank of games would be useful to many of the schools where I was working and hoped that they would share them with their families.  However, what started as a local project quickly spread well beyond the suburbs of Melbourne.  We have had picked up more than 3,000 followers and subscribers, teachers, students and parents from 39 different countries, all the way from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

One of my favourite games that we filmed is called Target Os and Xs (Downton, 2019).  The rules are listed below or you can use this link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwIfKu_fdqE&t=18s) to watch our video for this particular game.

Equipment

*Paper

*Pens

*Two 10-sided dice

*Deck of Cards 

Rules

1. Set-up a regulation Os and Xs board, with nine empty boxes (i.e. a 3 x 3 grid)

2. Use two ten-sided dice (or a deck of cards) to generate nine 2-digit numbers and write each number in one of the empty boxes on the board

3.  Each player is dealt six cards

4. Use two or more cards and any operation to create equation that equals one of the numbers on the board- if you can do this, you fill in that place with a O or X

5. Replace any used cards with new ones from the deck, so that each player has six cards in front of them at the start of each turn

6.  If you are unable to make a target number on any turn, you can pass.  This allows you to exchange as many cards from your hand as you want for new ones

7.  The first player to get three Os or three Xs in a row is the winner

 I love this game for a number of reasons.  Firstly, the target numbers are generated by rolling two dice, therefore they are random numbers.  This means that players who can think flexibly are rewarded in this game, rather than players who have memorised multiplication facts.  For example, 76 cannot be created by simply adding or multiplying two cards together.  However, it can easily be created by using three cards and a bit of flexible thinking (e.g. 7 x 10 + 6 or 8 x 10 – 4).  If you don’t have a ten card, players need to consider if they can make a ten (e.g. 7 + 3 or 5 x 2).  Again, this requires number sense and cannot be rote learned. 

The other reason that this game is one of my favourites is its dynamic nature.  On every turn, things are changing.  You are asked to work with different cards and the target number/s on the board that you are aiming to make will also change, depending on the move made by your opponent.  This adds an extra level of challenge to the game, which only makes it more engaging to play. 

Life appears to be slowly returning to some form of normality in Melbourne.  With schools reopening, it is back to the classroom for Nash and back to work for me.  Poison numbers was the 39th game that we filmed and it was also the final of our daily postings.  We have since created a new page on our website (www.lovemaths.me/games) where these games will be housed.  They are organised into categories (e.g. lower/upper primary, number/operations/other), in order to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.  However, Nash’s enthusiasm for playing and filming the games has remained, and so we are planning to add to this resource over time. 

My hope is that what started as a resource designed to help with remote learning can continued to be used in classrooms and in the homes of students.  Hopefully, these games can play a role in building stronger home-school connections in the area of mathematics learning well beyond whenever this current pandemic comes to an end.  If you visit the site and play some of our games, we would love to hear from you.

References

Bay-Williams, J.M., & Kling, G. (2014). Enriching addition and subtraction fact mastery through games. Teaching Children Mathematics, 21 (4), 238-247. 

Bay-Williams, J.M., & Kling, G. (2019). Math Fact Fluency, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 

Downton, A. (2019). It’s More Than a Game. Prime Number, 34 (3), 38-39.

Russo, J., Russo, T., Bragg, L. (2018). Five principles of educationally rich mathematical games.  Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom 23 (3), 30-34.

(This article originally appeared in the Journal of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (273), September 2020)