Dice and Card Games

  Computers and digital devices are fun but sometimes its necessary to change pace in class and go back to the old fashioned hands on cards or dice.  I use them sometimes as a back-up to what my students are learning.

One day to give my low performing group a chance to practice multiplication, I grabbed four dice.  I rolled two at a time to make two 2 digit numbers that my students then multiplied.  It might be 56 x 61 or 23 x 64.  Since I used dice, the numbers were as random as they could be with dice.

Another time, I grabbed two dice, each in a different color so one die represented positive and one negative.  I rolled the dice and used the numbers to complete the (x + ?) (x + ?) which students then multiplied.  After a couple of times through, I gave each student a set of dice so they could make their own binomial terms to multiply.

Students can play multiplication war using one deck of cards per two students.  An ace is worth 11, Jack 12, Queen 13, and King 14.  In addition black cards are positive numbers while red cards are negative numbers.  Deal the deck out so each player has 26 cards.   Each person flips over the top two cards and the person with the higher product gets all four cards.  In case of a tie, the cards are set aside until the next hand and the winner of that hand gets all the cards including those set aside.  The person with all the cards wins the game.

There is also exponent war which uses one deck of cards per two students.  All face cards are wroth 10 while the ace is worth either 1 or 10 but it has to be decided before the game starts. The cards are dealt even between the two players so each person has 26 cards.  The game begins the same as multiplication war with the first two cards being turned over but in this case the first card is the base and the second is the exponent.  The player with the higher product takes all four cards. If the products are the same, the cards are set aside and the winner of the next hand takes the four for that round and the ones set aside.  The winner is the one at the end who has all the cards.

To promote thinking, have the students play hit the target in groups of 2 to 5 players per deck of cards.  The players choose a target number and one student draws 5 cards from the deck.  The cards are laid face up and the players have to use addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and order of operation to use those 5 numbers to get to the target number.  Since students have to follow order of operations, they are allowed to use parenthesis to group numbers.  So if the target number is 22 and the person turned over a 5,5,6,2,A and the Ace is worth 1, the players have to arrange the numbers to equal 20 but the numbers can be moved around to accomplish it.  So you might do 5 x 5 - (6x1)/2 but that is not the only possibility.

I'll share more games in the future but these are a good start.  They don't take much to play and are easy to learn while letting students practice skills in a fun way.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.