The problem with maths games

Recently I wrote a blog explaining how reading an article about Taylor Swift made me reflect on the importance of skill fluency in Maths. If you missed this blog, you can read it here.

This week is another 'Taylor' inspired post!

On the February weekend when Taylor was in Melbourne for her concerts, our radio stations were playing ‘Taylor marathons’.  For the whole weekend they played back-to -back Taylor songs (and as she has released over 243 songs, there were plenty to choose from!)

On this weekend, while we were driving to some kid-activity, my daughters, who are fans (not super fans, just regular fans) of Taylor, decided to have a competition naming the songs as they came on the radio.

This was lots of fun and kept us all entertained for the car trip.

However, my 7-year-old daughter made a good point… she said “how do we know if we are correct?”

This really struck a chord with me. There was actually no way for us to know if we were identifying the correct song.

We decided for the competition to be 'fair' (competition integrity is always a high priority in our family!) we needed to be able to check if the person who named the song first was actually correct.

We came up with a plan.

Once the person named the song, we had a ‘song checker’ who would Google that song on my phone, press play and double check it was correct.

Reflecting back on this scenario later made me think of the maths classroom!

One thing I love doing in maths classrooms is incorporating games. I think games are a great way to work on fluency, encourage social interaction (turn taking, winning, losing) develop oral language skills and to generally increase engagement in maths.

While many of us grew up playing card or board games, with the prevalence of screens, ‘this generation’ seem to be playing card and board games at home less and less.

I think this increases the importance of us providing students opportunities to play games at school, and maths is a great context to allow for these experiences. 

For me, one of the challenges in the maths classroom is to build ‘checking’ mechanisms into the independent work our students complete. This includes, but is not limited to games.

I have observed classrooms where students are playing maths games.

They are great games that link to the learning intentions of the lesson, and the students are fully engaged…BUT I have observed students answering incorrectly and in the excitement of the 'game' their partners did not provide corrective feedback.

In these cases, the fluency practice that the game was intended to promote, was not occurring because the brain was not receiving critical feedback to alert it to the incorrect responses.

This is clearly a concern as the students were not only wasting precious learning time, they were creating incorrect neural pathways in their brain, which at a later time they would need to 'unlearn'- something that  is very difficult for the brain to do.

Now, I am very much aware of the challenges of teaching. I know what it is like in a maths classroom. You cannot physically be everywhere at once, and it is just not practical to watch every student answer every question when they are playing a game. But it is SO important that we try to build in checking mechanisms into our games that allow for feedback (from themselves or their partner) on each response.

As with everything in maths teaching, there are affordances and constraints we need to consider alongside every pedagogical decision we make.

The reality is we should not be playing games all day every day in our maths lessons. We need a balance in our approach and we need to be very clear on 'why' we are including a game.

In our planning we must be clear on the purpose for playing the game (for example, to work on fluency with factors and multiples) and there needs to be a checking mechanism built in (how will my students know they factors and multiples they identify in the game are correct?).

The checking mechanism will look different for every game, but some examples I have used are providing access to 'answer sheets' or calculators which allow partners to check responses. For example, if the game is 'Doubles Snap', before the game starts, I would ask each student to make a list on their mini whiteboard of the doubles that will come up in the game and their answers.

This way they are provided with another opportunity to recall their doubles facts, and have generated the perfect 'answer sheet' to refer to throughout the game.

This week I encourage you to reflect on how you can build in some self or partner checking into the games your students play...and if you play 'What's that song?' in the car, make sure you have a 'song checker' to ensure the game is played with the highest integrity!

Have a great week! 

Ange🎓🎲

P.S. You can download the PDF version of this blog to print or share with colleagues here.