12/9 Closing out 2019 with a bang

I knew after last week I wanted to do a game this time around to balance things out but I wasn’t quite sure which one to pick. So  I looked around a few sites like Kent Haines’ https://www.gamesforyoungminds.com/about  for ideas and toyed with one of the rectangle area games. But in the end I came back to the Game of Nim which I’ve know about forever but have never used in all these years with a group.

I had two goals with the activity:

• Keep everyone involved and interacting with different other students
• Notice strategies for winning that we could talk about at the end

So after thinking about structure I decided to go with a bracket system on the whiteboard. This had a few advantages. I randomized the starting pairs of kids who would interact. It generated intrinsic interest for many of the kids. And finally, the kids liked going back forth to the whiteboard to up date the statistics.

I started off with asking how many kids had played Nim before. There were only a few so I decided a demo game was definitely in order. After explaining all the rules I picked two of the experienced kids and had them slowly play a sample game on the whiteboard for everyone to watch.  There were still a few more questions afterwards which I answered.  At which point, I had everyone breakout and start playing on their own. (I chose have them play to the best out of 3 games and use 3 piles of 10 as the starting point)

Initially I worried that we would finish too quickly but as the game play unrolled it turned out to be take about 35-40 minutes to reach the playoff.  As kids were knocked out I let them watch the others which worked for most of the kids (and generated a lot of conversation about strategy) or play with game of 24 cards I had also brought,   Finally, when we were down to 2 kids, we did a playoff on the whiteboard. But I was a little evil and switched up the number of piles to make it more exciting.

Finally, we had 5 minutes left to talk about strategies.  I was very pleased to have one of the students come up with a good idea and want to show everyone.

P.O.T.W.

I went with a problem I learned of via Patrick Honner:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10tu2JHg3nnLowQVzuIGpSghGrwAuf3I-QiUoUQRLnos