8 Possible Dice Games to Practice Specific Math Skills in High School

 Most students love to play games because it makes things more fun.  The nice thing about dice based games is that one can use regular dice or digital dice.  Regular dice have a nice kinesthetic feel while one cannot loose the digital dice.

I've discovered a few games that are based on dice but can be played by high school students.

1.  The Area Game.  Students split into groups of two.  Each group is given two dice, a colored pen each, and a piece of graph paper.  The idea is that one student will roll the two dice and create a rectangle with length and width of the two dice before coloring the shape in.  The other student does this to find the measurements for their rectangles.  The two students continue till they run out of room to add anymore rectangles or squares.  They count the total area for each player and the player with the most area covered is the winner.

2.  Binomial Multiplication.  This can be done in groups of two or more.  Roll two dice to find the numbers used for the binomial terms.  For instance I roll a red 2 and a black 5 so I have to multiply (x - 2) (x + 5) to find out what trinomial it forms.

3.  Trinomial Factoring.  Roll three dice to provide the coefficients of the trinomial and let students factor it if they can using any method they know.  So if you roll a black 2, red 3,  and red 4, you'd give the students the trinomial 2x^2 - 3x - 4 to factor.

4.  Polynomials and roots.  In this you roll the number of dice to match the degree problem you want so you have the coefficients of the polynomial terms.  Then roll a single dice for the root and let the students practice using either polynomial or synthetic division to find out if it is a root and or what f(c) equals.

5.  Transformation games - roll two dice three times to find the vertices of a triangle.  Students will draw the triangle on a coordinate grid.  Then roll one more pair of dice to provide the translation of the original triangle.  Once the triangle has been translated, roll the two dice to find the dilation factor to apply to the new triangle.  This can be repeated with quadrilaterals, pentagons, or other sizes.

6.  Battleship using two dice and a coordinate grid.  The dice have to be at least 12 sided to work well.  Each student will color in the location of their battle ships on a coordinate grid before beginning.  They will have a screen made out of manila folders or on their tablet.  I bet one could even set it up using Desmos for this.  Once both players have their ships in place, they begin rolling the dice to find the x and y values.  The student reads out the coordinate result and the other student lets them know if they scored a hit.  If they did, they can roll the dice again but if they missed, the other student will roll and read out the coordinate of their roll.

7.  Order of operations. Roll 5 dice and write the numbers on the board.  Students can use any operations to find a goal number.

8.  Mean, median, mode, and range.  Roll 10 twenty sided dice and let the students use those numbers to practice finding the mean, median, mode, and range for theses numbers.

These are just a few games one can use in the math classroom using dice.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.